Sea change: Exploring the international effort to promote marine protected areas

Citing multiple threats to marine biodiversity and resources, the international marine conservation community is promoting greater adoption of marine protected areas (MPAs). Like terrestrial protected areas, MPAs are characterised by debates over the appropriate role for scientific input and citizen participation and how to balance concerns for both social equity and ecological effectiveness. This paper explores how such debates are influencing the framing of MPAs as a global policy tool, based on an ′event ethnography′ conducted at the 2008 World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. International non-governmental organisations (NGOs) dominated the discussions and agenda setting, although multiple concerns for MPAs were incorporated into the discussions. The framing of MPAs highlighted a global scale and vision, reflected by and reinforcing the dominant role of the big NGOs. However, it did not go unchallenged, nor is it prescriptive

The role of boundary organizations in co-management: examining the politics of knowledge integration in a marine protected area in Belize

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an increasingly popular tool for management of the marine commons. Effective governance is essential if MPAs are to achieve their objectives, yet many MPAs face conflicts and governance challenges, including lack of trust and knowledge integration between fishers, scientists, and policy makers. This paper considers the role of a boundary organization in facilitating knowledge integration in a co-managed MPA, the Gladden Spit and Silk Cayes Marine Reserve in Belize. Boundary organizations can play an important role in resource management, by bridging the science-policy divide, facilitating knowledge integration, and enabling communication in conditions of uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Belize, the paper identifies four challenges for knowledge integration. First, actors have divergent perspectives on whether and how knowledge is being integrated. Second, actors disagree on resource conditions within the MPA and how these should be understood. Third, in order to maintain accountability with multiple actors, including fishers, government, and funders, the boundary organization has promoted the importance of different types of knowledge for different purposes (science and fishers’ knowledge), rather than the integration of these. Finally, a lack of trust and uneven power relations make it difficult to separate knowledge claims from political claims. However, even if knowledge integration proves difficult, boundary organizations may still play an important role by maintaining accountability, providing space for conflicting understandings to co-exist, and ultimately for governance institutions to evolve

Waves of Change? Politics of Knowledge and Participation in Marine Protected Areas

<p>Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an increasingly prevalent and popular conservation tool, yet there is still much debate over whether they should emphasize the role of expert knowledge or local participation. This debate occurs among an international network of scientists and conservation professionals as well as in relation to particular places and MPAs. This dissertation contributes to an understanding of MPAs by addressing three questions: (1) How do differently situated actors within the MPA social network define and mobilize ideas of knowledge and participation? (2) How are knowledge and participation enacted and perceived in particular MPAs? (3) How do perceptions of knowledge and participation relate to actors' views of the success of MPAs? In order to address these questions, this dissertation presents the results of two separate projects: (1) a survey of international experts at the First International Marine Protected Areas Congress; and (2) an ethnographic study of two marine protected areas and their associated communities and social networks in southern Belize. The results of the survey indicate that the international MPA community is divided in their opinions on what constitutes science and what role scientists should play in the MPA policy process. Scientists who had a positivist view of science were reluctant to engage in MPA policy making, whereas government representatives who held positivist beliefs were more likely to support scientists advocating for particular MPA policies. The results of the ethnographic study in Belize illustrate that multiple groups work to produce, interpret, and contest knowledge for MPA policy, while also engaging in scalar strategies to define what MPAs are, how they should function, and who should be involved in their management. MPA success in Belize is not dependent on either conclusive expert knowledge or positive perceptions of participation, but rather on the accommodation of multiple groups' agendas.</p>Dissertatio

The Maoist Movement and Peasant Struggle: Political Ecology Approach

This paper attempts to identify the differences between apolitical perspectives and political ecology approaches to regional socio-environmental issues by delineating the Maoist (Naxal) insurgency in India, using the respective camps of interpretation. A Malthusian view of the issue, within the theory of Eco-Scarcity, is briefly examined. The bulk of this report will pay attention to Environmental Conflict method of describing the rural uprising within the setting of social hierarchies expressed through resource appropriation. The resource categories discussed are agricultural lands, water, forests, and mineral ores

Configuring the field of global marine biodiversity conservation

The article describes and analyzes the emergence of the field of global marine biodiversity conservation over the past fifteen years. We draw on collaborative research at international meetings, which we position as 'field' sites, places where diverse actors come together to negotiate the meaning and terms of global environmental governance and where that work is accessible and visible to researchers. Based on Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE), a method developed to facilitate study of large meetings, we mobilize research from seven meetings since 2008 to describe the field of global marine biodiversity conservation, but more importantly to specify how that field has been configured. We identify practices of orchestration, narrative, performance, alliance, social objects, devices, and technologies, formal outcomes, and formal procedures, and their use at three phases of field configuration: building, framing, and bounding. The results: 1) enhance our understanding of the role of international conferences in global environmental governance generally, and for marine biodiversity conservation specifically; 2) demonstrate the relevance of field and field configuration theory; 3) contribute to theory on institutional fields by specifying practices of field configuration

Beyond Baselines: Rethinking Priorities for Ocean Conservation

In 1995, Daniel Pauly identified a "shifting baselines syndrome" (SBS). Pauly was concerned that scientists measure ecosystem change against their personal recollections of the past and, based on this decidedly short-term view, mismanage fish stocks because they tolerate gradual and incremental elimination of species and set inappropriate recovery goals. As a concept, SBS is simple to grasp and its logic is compelling. Much current work in marine historical ecology is rationalized in part as a means of combating SBS, and the term has also resonated outside of the academy with environmental advocacy groups. Although we recognize both conceptual and operational merit in SBS, we believe that the ultimate impact of SBS on ocean management will be limited by some underlying and interrelated problematic assumptions about ecology and human-environment relations, and the prescriptions that these assumptions support. In this paper, we trace both assumptions and prescriptions through key works in the SBS literature and interrogate them via ecological and social science theory and research. We argue that an expanded discussion of SBS is needed, one that engages a broader range of social scientists, ecologists, and resource users, and that explicitly recognizes the value judgments inherent in deciding both what past ecosystems looked like and whether or not and how we might reconstruct them

Unraveling the blue paradox: Incomplete analysis yields incorrect conclusions about Phoenix Islands Protected Area closure

In PNAS, McDermott et al. (1) analyze a 2014-2016 central Pacific fishing surge, focusing on the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) inside the Kiribati exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The authors incorrectly attribute the surge to the anticipated industrial fishing closure of PIPA and describe the phenomenon as a blue paradox (i.e., an unintended negative consequence of a conservation policy). However, a broader analysis demonstrates that this surge was unrelated to the closure of PIPA and was due to a strong El Ni~no event that created a fishing surge across multiple EEZs and high seas, not just PIPA (2)