The challenges outlined in Context are united in a single over-arching research question: How can theories and practices of Conservation Data Justice advance our understanding of conservation data, prioritisation and practices to promote socially-just, decolonised, conservation?
We divide this question into four objectives:
Objective 1 —
The first objective is to understand how data-driven blind-spots, bias and prejudice are produced. We will examine the ways in which people are incorporated, and excluded, in large-scale conservation priorities. We will consider what assumptions in the data and modelling might make it harder to include people’s needs in conservation prioritisation.
Objective 2 —
The second objective is to explore how theories of Data Justice, and decolonised approaches to Data Justice, can promote socially-just conservation. We will explore how issues that arise from social media data and their algorithms can be applied to remote-sensing data and models and explore challenges resulting from social media data being incorporated into conservation data. This will also consider how insights from critical GIS researchers can be incorporated into Conservation Data Justice. We will seek to apply this theory by exploring how can decolonised approaches to conservation prioritisation might allow historically marginalised rural people more thoroughly to occupy the centre of large-scale conservation prioritisation debates.
Objective 3 —
The third objective of this project is to understand how epistemic communities learn, or fail to learn from each other, and how stronger inter-disciplinarity might be encouraged in conservation prioritisation. We will explore under what circumstances conservation prioritisation maps are produced and the epistemic communities driving them. We will examine what research communities question prioritisation work and how these groupings talk to each other and learn from each other.
Objective 4 —
The fourth objective of this project is to derive practical, bespoke and effective policy measures that will promote conservation policies founded on social justice. Here We will consider how influential these large-scale prioritisation exercises are and how global maps travel from the places where they are conceived and debated to their intended domains of action.