The Rise of Ecosystem Services in Biodiversity Conservation

这个博士论文项目调查了生态系统服务的概念如何在过去二十年里在自然资源保护者中获得了广泛的流行。它将阐明是什么解释了它不断扩大的影响力，以这种方式重新代表生物多样性的利害关系，以及这个术语的使用告诉我们关于保护的什么，包括它的构成政治，以及它对那些参与其中的人意味着什么。该项目将侧重于框架的核心拥护者的经验，他们对框架的传播起到了重要作用。它将使用定性的社会科学方法，包括访谈、参与者观察以及在不列颠哥伦比亚省、自然资本项目和生物多样性和生态系统服务政府间平台内的保护从业者中嵌入的组织人种学。除了寻求分析定义生态系统服务话语的斗争之外，它还将通过开发教学模块、演讲和与研究助理合作来干预对话。研究结果将通过出版物、会议、主持生态系统服务问题讨论的网络博客、大众媒体的社论以及对相关环境组织的志愿者援助来传播。技术总结这个项目扩展了来自科学技术研究、政治生态学和制度理论的理论框架，以理解生态系统服务的兴起。虽然已经出现了分析特定地点的研究，这些地点已经引入了以生态系统服务为灵感的政策，但这个项目试图了解连接这些地点并推动这些政策的网络参与者。该项目将分析的重点从个体生态系统服务项目转向促成这些项目的上游认知斗争。它将有助于学术辩论，探讨市场逻辑与环保主义日益交织在一起的问题；新自由化和商品化的文化政治；变革的推动者如何谈判激进政治与改革派政治的前景和危险；思想和跨国认知网络影响制度变革的能力；以及由这些动态产生的权力关系和构建这些动态的权力关系。该项目将有助于对使话语制度化为政策和实践的机制和条件提供新的见解，并将产生关于其追随者正在设想和颁布生态系统服务的方式的新知识。

General Audience Summary This doctoral dissertation project investigates how the concept of ecosystem services has gained widespread currency among conservationists over the last two decades. It will shed light on what explains its expanding influence, what is at stake in re-representing biodiversity in this manner, and what the use of this term tell us about conservation, including its constitutive politics and what it means for those who take part in it. The project will focus on the experiences of core champions of the framework who have been instrumental to its propagation. It will use qualitative social science methods, including interviews, participant observation, and embedded organizational ethnography among conservation practitioners in British Columbia, with the Natural Capital Project, and inside the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. In addition to seeking to analyze struggles to define ecosystem services discourse, it will intervene in that conversation by developing teaching modules, delivering lectures, and collaborating with research assistants. Findings will be disseminated through publications, conferences, a weblog hosting discussion of ecosystem services issues, editorials for popular press, and volunteer assistance to pertinent environmental organizations.Technical Summary This project extends theoretical frameworks from science and technology studies, political ecology, and institutional theory to understand the rise of ecosystem services. While research has emerged analyzing particular sites where policies inspired by ecosystem services have been introduced, this project seeks to understand the networked actors that connect across these sites and push for those kinds of policies. This project refocuses analysis from individual ecosystem services programs to the upstream epistemic struggles that precipitate them. It will contribute to academic debates exploring the increased intertwining of market logics with environmentalism; the cultural politics of neo-liberalization and commodification; how agents of change negotiate the promise and perils of radical versus reformist politics; the capacity of ideas and transnational epistemic networks to effect institutional change; and the power relations arising from and structuring each of these dynamics. This project will contribute novel insights into the mechanisms and conditions that allow discourses to institutionalize into policy and practice, and will generate new knowledge about the ways ecosystem services are being envisioned and enacted by its adherents.