Data Justice in Colombia’s area-based conservation policy: the case of Other Effective Conservation Measures

My PhD research focuses on the integration of Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs)1 into conservation policy and practice in Colombia, in response to the global commitment to protect 30% of the Earth’s terrestrial and marine areas by 2030 (the “30×30” target). Colombia is a particularly interesting case: it was the first country in Latin America—and one of the few globally—to report sites as OECMs, with 47 currently recognised (Protected Planet, 2025).

I take a multi-scalar approach to examine how OECM framings are adopted and interpreted at national and subnational scales, and how these narratives either align with, or instead obscure and clash with, regional territorial planning and locally grounded perspectives and priorities for environmental governance.

Drawing on qualitative methods and theories of social, environmental, epistemic, and data justice, my research focuses on two fronts:

  1. National and policy-making scale, analysing how Colombia has incorporated OECMs into area-based conservation targets and priorities, and the policy and data infrastructures, actors, knowledges and data mobilised to support them.
  2. Regional and local scales: studying two reported OECMs—watersheds with management plans in peri-urban and rural areas of Antioquia region, in the Andean mountain range—to examine how these sites were nominated, and ask what this designation means for governance on the ground.

I then explore how actors perceive and shape environmental governance in practice, and what this implies for conservation and social equity. This includes exploring some of the socio-environmental conflicts present in these territories, which global maps depict as conserved and equitably governed.

Picture: Valeria Zapata Giraldo. A typical landscape in the Río Negro river basin area, Antioquia, Colombia.

Valeria Zapata-Giraldo

PhD Researcher

  1. OECM definition: “A geographically defined area other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem functions and services and where applicable, cultural, spiritual, socio–economic, and other locally relevant values” (CBD, 2018) ↩︎