Recognising and Resisting Injustice: Knowledge Practices and Politics Amongst Nepal’s Community Forestry Professionals

The future of inclusive forestry in Nepal depends on forestry professionals who can recognise patriarchal roots of gender injustice as they operate in the ideologies and apparatus of forest governance, and who can resist those injustices through their work. This paper uses the notion of knowledge practices to explore the recognition of injustice amongst Nepals community forestry professionals, and the relationship between recognition and resistance, highlighting the inherently political nature of all knowledge practices. By drawing on over fifty interviews and ethnographic insights, this paper goes beyond the typically black-boxed and essentialised forestry professional and unsettles the false dichotomy between the professional and the personal. Nepals community forestry professionals represent a plurality of knowledges, emerging from unique positionalities and personal experiences; however, the demand for quantifiable, short-term project outputs (attributed to funders and donors) shuts down their opportunities to meaningfully practice their knowledges. This paper articulates how, in order to resist injustices within both forest user communities and forestry institutions, professionals are demanding a greater focus on learningfrom the lived realities of forest users, from each other as practitioners, from qualitative engagements with complexity and processes of change, from so-called mistakes, and ultimately from greater reflexivity. Through such learning and reflection comes the opportunity to recognise and resist injustices and create socially just community forestry. This paper urges scholars to go beyond black-boxing those in the forestry sector, and instead to offer solidarity and support in promoting knowledge practices that recognise and resist injustices and thus help build socially just forest futures

Conservation's All about Having a Blether and Getting People on Board: Exploring Cooperation for Conservation in Scotland

A 'blether' is a colloquial Scottish term signifying 'a lengthy chat between friends', and this paper draws its inspiration from the conservationist who suggested that 'having a blether' and 'getting people on board' is what conservation is all about. Contributing to scholarship on conservation conflict and on convivial conservation, this paper explores the 'who', 'where' and 'when' of 'having a blether', seeking to understand what might cultivate and contribute to cooperative relations between conservationists and other land-managers. It draws on feminist political ecology and anthropologies of conservation to provide a framework with which to unpack the personal, spatial and temporal dimensions of conservation relationships, and applies this to a case study in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. Considering the 'who' in conservation relations, led to looking beyond professional affiliations to highlight the importance of intersectional identities and interests, as expressed through personal connections and emotions. Considering the 'where' of cooperation for conservation, so-called 'informal' and 'everyday spaces' were found to be highly significant as shared sites in which productive relationships can be built. Considering the 'when' of conservation relations revealed their emergent nature, and of the building of understanding and appreciation through shared pasts and experiences. This paper promotes the need to open up and move beyond stereotyped stakeholder groups, to consider what promotes not only commonalities but also appreciation of differences. It also draws attention to the political and structural forces that mediate conservation relations and shutdown opportunities for greater cooperation and inclusivity. Ultimately, this paper highlights the need for dialogue and for listening to diverse others with care and attention, seeing the ideal and practice of 'having a blether' and 'getting people on board' as a way to promote cooperative – or convivial – conservation

Making a case for the consideration of trust, justice and power in conservation relationships

In conservation, trust and justice are increasingly recognized as both intrinsically valuable and critical for successful socioecological outcomes. However, the interdependence between these concepts has not been explored. The conservation trust literature provides examples of efforts to build trust between conservationists and local actors; yet, these interventions are often conceived to incentivize local cooperation within dominant paradigms. We argue that when trust building is promoted as a technical fix that does not plan in advance to address power asymmetries in conservation practice, inequities may inadvertently be re‐embedded. Therefore, we conceptualized a framework that joins trust, justice, and power so that critical analyses of conservation partnerships can be more effectively undertaken. We drew on environmental justice theory to better calibrate the trust literature for the historical‐political settings of conservation, especially in the Global South. Justice and trust share strong theoretical links where perceptions of justice shape a willingness to trust, and, equally, trust is a precondition for justice to be perceived. Different forms of trust connect to varied domains of justice and power in different ways, which mediates the outcomes of interventions. We applied our framework to case studies to explore how these interdependences play out in practice. Failure of agencies to attend to issues of maldistribution, misrecognition of cultural values and knowledge, and exclusion from participation strongly compromised trust. Moreover, the ways in which nature‐dependent communities and marginalized conservation workers are trusted, or the conditions under which they give trust, can lead to partnerships being perceived as just or unjust. Focusing on trust and justice can help identify power dynamics so they can be addressed more readily and create space for alternative understandings of partnerships

Fieldwork in conservation organisations–A review of methodological challenges, opportunities and ethics

Social science methodologies are increasingly used by conservation organisations to improve social-ecological outcomes. However, ethnographic approaches seeking to understand organisations themselves and how organisational culture impacts biodiversity and social justice are rarely discussed. By exploring previous studies of the methodological considerations of organisational ethnography in conservation, we provide conservationists and ethnographers with an empirically grounded understanding of the opportunities, challenges and underlying ethical considerations of this approach.We conducted a scoping review of a disparate body of literature where ethnographers were embedded in conservation organisations and discussed their methodology, identifying 26 studies for analysis. We then extracted information on key themes relevant to methodological process and uptake.Our review found such research spanned the globe, with a broad range of methodological and ethical considerations related to how ethnographers and conservationists interact. For example, organisational ethnography was perceived as valuable by conservationists as it allowed tracking progress toward internal goals such as diversification of staff and providing moral and emotional support and valuable information for transforming organisational practices. However, conservationists also worried about ethnographers' presence in their organisations. A key methodological challenge we identify, corroborating with the literature, is how ethnographers can benefit organisations while supplying critique.Based on the results, we provide recommendations and areas of reflection for conservation organisations and ethnographers. Mainstreaming organisational ethnography through attention to certain methodological considerations can be beneficial for the future of conservation organisations and the biodiversity and people they impact

Technical experts’ perspectives of justice-related norms:Lessons from everyday environmental practices in Indonesia

The involvement of technical experts in environmental management and their perspectives on environmental justice issues can influence how justice notions become integrated into sub-national policies and programs. In other words, the justice-related norms perceived by technical experts have a huge impact on the delivery of justice for society and local environmental practices. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as the world’s most widespread environmental policy tool, provides an opportunity for exploring the incorporation of justice in everyday environmental practices. Specifically, how justice concerns related to global sustainability goals might be promoted or shutdown at the sub-national level through the actions of the technical experts involved i.e., those referred to here as ‘intermediary actors.’ This article reports on research which used semi-structured interviews to investigate the justice-related norms prioritized and promoted by intermediary actors, namely consultants, academics, and governmental officers, in the technical review process of EIA in Indonesia. It also examined the facilitating or constraining factors for negotiating and mobilizing those norms in the project debates of EIA at the sub-national level. We find that the intermediaries engaged with prioritized issues of justice unevenly, as they prioritized distributive and procedural justice over recognitional concerns. Our findings also uncovered crucial structural factors that have preserved existing unequal power relationships in a decentralized environmental governance system. Traditional and authoritative customs underlying environmental policies and practices therefore have significantly influenced the prioritization of justice-related norms. These social and cultural contexts have also restricted an upward mobilization of justice concerns from the sub-national to national and international governance levels. This study argues that the intermediaries need various institutional, physical, and social resources to advance global sustainability and justice agendas at the sub-national level via existing national environmental management tools

The value of listening and listening for values in conservation

Listening is a pervasive and significant act of conservation research and praxis, mattering greatly for the realisation of conservation agendas, not least its ambitions to be outward looking and inclusive in approach. Yet, the value and role of listening has been barely explored in a sustained and reflexive way. This paper is a preliminary schematic of what it might mean to attend to the act of listening, set within the context of a larger field of listening scholarship as well as more specific manoeuvres to embed relational approaches into the study of people and nature interactions. We explore what it means to 'listen well' within the context of conservation, highlighting the importance of recognising listening as a relationship and our positions and power within those relationships; the need to care for the relationship through respect and empathy; and the building of inclusive relationships of listening by attending to how space and time influences understanding. We offer examples of how researchers and practitioners can create spaces for listening, illustrating our discussion with personal reflections about listening practices gained through our various conservation and research careers. We provide approaches and ideas which help the reader—academic and practitioner—to both understand and articulate the value of listening in conservation and relational values of nature. We hope to inspire the wider use of listening-based approaches in conservation research and practice, and the recognition and support from senior managers and funders of what is needed to promote long-term and meaningful relationships between people and nature