Workshop "Conservation, Climate Change And Decolonisation - Exploring New Frontiers In Conservation Social Science"

Understanding biodiversity conservation and its role in diverse society and contemporary social dilemmas faces diverse interlocking challenges.

First, conservation is integrally bound up in the function and reproduction of capitalism, in the form of carbon/biodiversity offsets, (eco-)tourism in and around protected areas, and the broader commodification of ecosystem services. In fact, conservation is often misrecognised to be separate, even a refuge, from capitalism. If conservation (and climate change) policies are tied to an agenda of economic growth and development, they contribute to depoliticise and foreclose discussion on the nature of the social and economic forces causing biodiversity loss and climate change and hinder implementation of effective solutions to deal with these problems.

Second, in search of solutions to anthropogenic climate change, transitions to low carbon societies can also entail dramatic re-organisations of conservation estate and policy – and therefore also society – whilst climate change itself might require changing conservation policy to cope with the habitat change it causes, changing current geographies of conservation. A third challenge is that conservation social science, although not as much as mainstream conservation science, primarily reproduces research practices and paradigms that have been developed in the West, which result in specific forms of knowledge, social organization and ways of apprehending the world.

This two-day workshop, organized by ICTA-UAB and the University of Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID), will bring together conservation and climate change social scientists from all ages and from across the world to share their most recent research tackling at least one of the three challenges highlighted above. The workshop combines participants’ short presentations with networking activities and group discussions to plan diverse interventions in these debates including academic publications, more popular writings, new projects and further networking opportunities.

The workshop can also be followed on Twitter, under the #ConSocSci-ICTA

Workshop plenaries
The 3 workshop plenaries by Prof. Sarah Bracking (King’s College London), Prof. Catherine Corson (Mount Holyoke College) and Prof. Rosaleen Duffy (University of Sheffield) will be live-streamed on ICTA’s Youtube Channel  (see programme for exact times, all on CEST).

 

FULL PROGRAMME

 
Organisers
Esteve Corbera and Sara Maestre-Andrés (ICTA-UAB)
Dan Brockington and Rose Pritchard (University of Sheffield)

 
International promoters
Elia Apostolopoulou and Bill Adams (UK), Jonathan Barton (Chile), Tor A. Benjaminsen (Norway), Jessica Dempsey (Canada), Leticia Durand and Fernanda Figueroa (Mexico), Rob Fletcher (The Netherlands), Jens F. Lund (Denmark), Christine Noe (Tanzania), Tracey Osborne and Paul Robbins (USA), Nitin Rai (India), Andreas Scheba (South Africa), Gert Van Hecken (Belgium), Maria Alejandra Velez (Colombia).