Conference Agenda

In the social sciences, labour has been theorised as a key mediator of material and affective relationships between society, technology and the natural environment. Because conservation and associated approaches to environmental management seek to shape these relationships, questions of labour (and values relatedly) bear on all aspects of conservation- design and management of projects, enrolment of rural livelihoods and care labour in ‘community-based’ projects, understanding how conflicts arise, and evolving roles that conservation activities play in processes of development and globalization. However, biodiversity conservation policies have still to embrace these, leading to a limited understanding of how people are put to work for conservation, under what conditions they work, and how conservation affects labour dynamics. Drawing on existing labour engagements in conservation social sciences and empirical material from a national park and a biodiversity hotspot region in India, this presentation argues for five areas of further inquiry toward a robust, transdisciplinary analysis of labor within conservation. These include- Forms of labour conservation enrols; Role of labour relations in conservation conflicts; How conservation affects labour dynamics in other sectors, such as forestry and tourism; How technology shapes changing opportunities for work, discipline of workers; and How labour and ecological conditions shape one another.

Besides landscape fragmentation, social fragmentations in the form of contestation and conflicts are considered a challenge for biodiversity conservation in protected areas such as Natura 2000 sites in the EU. While ecological fragmentation and lack of acceptance of Natura 2000 have long been studied, measures to address these challenges tend to target shallow leverage points, e.g., with support mechanisms, management standards, or round tables. Deeper values, paradigms and worldviews underlying interactions in protected areas are much less understood. The concept of connection to nature offers the opportunity to understand these deeper leverage points towards sustainability. Applying this perspective to protected areas in a Northern-German case, we explore the diverse dimensions of human-nature connections and disconnections. We conducted 38 qualitative interviews with a broad array of local respondents that stand in relationship with selected Natura 2000 sites through their daily work or life. We developed narratives of human-nature connections based on a reflexive thematic analysis of the data. The narratives illustrate how protected areas can contribute to enable or constrain human-nature connections as well as social connections, and how the awareness of the diversity of connections can inform protected area governance and management and increase their social benefits and inclusivity.

Students enrolling in higher education courses today are highly motivated by environmental issues such as climate, biodiversity conservation, and sustainability. Importantly however, decisions to conserve the functioning of the natural world must also be considered in relation to social conditions. Thus, conservation decisions, such as the 30 by 30 commitments, must be considerate of both ecological and social values. The extent to which higher education students appreciate the complexity herein is in question. To evaluate complex decision-making within this context, a conservation course at a large (>50,000 students) US university was developed. This course was designed to enable students to unpack global problems in conservation and sustainability. Student perspectives were assessed via pre- and post-course surveys and reflection instruments. At the outset of the course, it was hypothesized that students would more highly value social justice. Following the 15-week course with immersive content provided in the social and ecological dilemmas of conservation, using subsistence poaching in the Global South as an exemplar topic, student perspectives modulated. This indicated an emerging understanding of how difficult it is to manage coupled human and natural systems. The presentation describes the structure of this course enabling it to be replicated at other universities globally.

We highlight the need for ecological justice to go hand in hand with social justice in conservation science. We focus on the importance of ecocentric (non-anthropocentric) worldviews for advancing both social and ecological justice. While acknowledging the need to “decolonize” conservation, we question whether conservation as a whole may be justifiably termed “colonial”; noting that colonialism in the name of profit and political power has long been a main driver of both human rights abuses and biodiversity loss. Moreover, modern conservation science explicitly strives for social justice and equity while protecting biological diversity and thus ought not to be conflated with colonialism's long and unjust history. We suggest that efforts to portray modern conservation science as patriarchal, racist, and colonial are shortsighted, disregarding longstanding efforts by conservationists to reconcile social and ecological values.We conclude that the conservation community should shift focus toward targeting the main political actors and economic structures that oppress both humans and non-humans alike. A more nuanced appreciation of the shared history of colonialism and conservation may illuminate how social and ecological values converge in the mission of sustaining the ecological life support system on which every human and non-human being depends.