Biodiversity Conservation Governance on the Tibetan Plateau: Cross-scale Linkages and Bridging Organizations

<p>The ‘roof of the world’ is one of the most ecologically diverse and vulnerable regions on earth. Tibetan pastoralists have developed an institutionalized system of checks and balances to regulate access to and conservation of natural resources. However, traditional resource management institutions are greatly transformed by government driven development and conservation projects. Recent studies on adaptive co-management have emphasized the importance of linking institutional and organizational structures at different scales for sustaining socio-ecological resilience and managing cross-scale problems of conservation. Extraordinary conservation accomplishments have been made in cases where government and local communities engage in partnerships for collaborative conservation management. The methodology for this study incorporated a social network approach that presents a unique analysis of the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in enabling more collaborative conservation governance arrangements in the Tibetan Plateau region. The study is based on a field research in China where I used semi-structured interviews to investigate NGOs perspectives about the main triggers and barriers to more collaborative conservation approaches on the Tibetan Plateau and their role in facilitating the communication among different stakeholder groups. My main findings are that NGOs have significant influence on enabling more collaborative conservation management initiatives. The creation of crossinstitutional partnerships, flexibility in conservation approaches, mutual learning, and trust building processes are seen as the most effective means to more collaborative conservation approaches. Conversely, unequal power relationships, different understandings of how to approach conservation issues and a diversity of partially conflicting interests and priorities are identified as the main barriers.</p>

Biodiversity Conservation Governance on the Tibetan Plateau: Cross-scale Linkages and Bridging Organizations

<p>The ‘roof of the world’ is one of the most ecologically diverse and vulnerable regions on earth. Tibetan pastoralists have developed an institutionalized system of checks and balances to regulate access to and conservation of natural resources. However, traditional resource management institutions are greatly transformed by government driven development and conservation projects. Recent studies on adaptive co-management have emphasized the importance of linking institutional and organizational structures at different scales for sustaining socio-ecological resilience and managing cross-scale problems of conservation. Extraordinary conservation accomplishments have been made in cases where government and local communities engage in partnerships for collaborative conservation management. The methodology for this study incorporated a social network approach that presents a unique analysis of the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in enabling more collaborative conservation governance arrangements in the Tibetan Plateau region. The study is based on a field research in China where I used semi-structured interviews to investigate NGOs perspectives about the main triggers and barriers to more collaborative conservation approaches on the Tibetan Plateau and their role in facilitating the communication among different stakeholder groups. My main findings are that NGOs have significant influence on enabling more collaborative conservation management initiatives. The creation of crossinstitutional partnerships, flexibility in conservation approaches, mutual learning, and trust building processes are seen as the most effective means to more collaborative conservation approaches. Conversely, unequal power relationships, different understandings of how to approach conservation issues and a diversity of partially conflicting interests and priorities are identified as the main barriers.</p>

Understanding the governance of sustainability pathways: Hydraulic megaprojects, social-ecological traps, and politicized networks of action situations

To enable robust and just sustainability pathways, we need to understand how social-ecological systems (SES) respond to different governance configurations, considering their historical, institutional, political and power conditions. We advance a robust methodological tool for the integrated analysis of those conditions, focusing on SES traps and building on an existing case study: the Doñana region (Guadalquivir estuary, SW Spain), an estuary-delta SES. Doñana is characterized by institutional rigidity for water resources and wetland conservation governance and, more generally, by a SES rigidity trap. Here, we focus on a relatively recent hydraulic megaproject involving deep dredging in the Guadalquivir estuary, finally canceled due to its broad negative socioeconomic and environmental repercussions. Our methodological development consists of a novel combination of the politicized version of the Institutional Analysis and Development (pIAD) framework and the Networks of Action Situations (NAS) approach. Our analysis reveals a governance configuration characterized by strategic interactions among key actors posing no new large socioeconomic or environmental risks in the short term. This pattern is however vulnerable due to an underlying coordination failure and sub-optimal equilibrium situation, which emerge from a pattern of uncooperative behavior that cannot be explained without considering discourse inertia and power dynamics. Deep dredging could have led to a sudden fall of governance into a below sub-optimal equilibrium and regime shift toward a lock-in trap posing high sunk and trajectory-shifting costs. Currently, the game is on for achieving a shift to a high ‘blue equilibrium’ and launching a robust sustainability pathway through collective action.

Small NGOs and Agenda-Setting in Global Conservation Governance: The Case of Pangolin Conservation

The study of global environmental governance suggests that agenda-setting power is concentrated in a handful of high-profile, leading nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The recent rise of interest in pangolin conservation constitutes a deviant case in this theoretical tradition. In order to explain the puzzle, I introduce a new theory of small NGO influence and illustrate the mechanisms through the case study of pangolin conservation. Based on in-depth interviews with conservation NGOs, I show how small NGOs raised the salience of pangolin trafficking in global conservation governance by appealing to the shared values of the people who are highly interested in conservation. Moreover, the targeting of traditional Chinese medicine as the driver of pangolin extinction, while unintentionally, helped raise the salience of pangolin trafficking by leveraging the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Global North. Finally, small NGOs were able to use their expertise to guide leading NGOs and state officials in rule-making processes. The findings offer a corrective to the hierarchical view of civil society, calling for more careful evaluations of small NGOs in global conservation governance.

Killing for the common good? The (bio)politics of wolf management in Washington State

Washington State has been rocked by conflict over wolves, whose return to rural landscapes after their extirpation a century ago has brought them into new, often violent relations with human society. I interpret this emblematic instance of human–wildlife conflict as fundamentally a human–human conflict and a manifestation of different deep-seated sociocultural norms and values toward wolves. This social conflict hinges on two competing, underacknowledged forms of commoning—wildlife as a public trust and grazing access to public lands—that already intertwine the economy of the rural Western United States. Amid these tensions, wildlife managers seek to reduce conflict through the targeted killing (“lethal removal”) of wolves that repeatedly prey on livestock. I draw on ethnographic research examining the ongoing debate over lethal removal policy in Washington’s “Wolf Advisory Group,” an advisory committee aimed at transforming Washington’s wolf conflict through collaborative governance. Drawing together the theoretical frameworks of commoning and conservation environmentality, I frame these debates as an effort to produce shared social norms regarding wolf life and death. In this context, lethal removal of wolves functions as a biopolitical intervention targeted to affect social values, producing “social tolerance” for wolves in Washington’s rural landscapes. The paradox of wolf conservation governance is that achieving the social tolerance necessary for long-term recovery requires that the state kill wolves in the name of shared common interest and responsibility.

From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples