Conservation Data Justice

Introduction

CONDJUST will create a new research field, Conservation Data Justice, that bridges three distinct areas of enquiry: conservation prioritisation, political ecology, and Data Justice. The former uses data which risk marginalising rural peoples. The latter does not yet examine conservation data. Meanwhile, political ecologists do not yet consider Data Justice approaches when tackling conservation prioritisation. CONDJUST will interrogate conservation data and models, and explore the epistemic communities producing them, to develop new theories of socially just, data-driven conservation. It will challenge the colonising tendencies of prioritisation work and seek decolonising alternatives.

Timeliness of the Project

CONDJUST is timely because ambitious new global targets seek to safeguard 30% of the planet for conservation by 2030 (and more afterwards). These plans pose risks for rural people because the data and modelling they use can contain diverse forms of bias, exclusion, and omission. These risks will grow as more social media data are used in conservation prioritisation. We need insights from Data Justice to understand these dangers and how they might be counteracted.

Project Objectives

This project has four objectives, each with a corresponding work package. These are:

1. Systematically examine the sources of bias and distortion in conservation data used in global prioritisation work.
2. Use Data Justice thinking in new analyses of biodiversity conservation and increase our understanding of socially just conservation prioritisation.
3. Critically explore the construction of different epistemic communities in conservation prioritisation and political ecology to understand what inhibits and enhances learning between them.
4. Examine how policies responding to prioritisation are shaped by, or resist, the new measures proposed.

Team Composition

These work packages will be pursued by an interdisciplinary team led by the PI and composed of three post-doctoral researchers, two PhDs, an administrator, and an advisory board.