RUI: Utilizing Collaborative Event Ethnography to Understand Global Environmental Governance

该项目使用一种称为协作事件人种学的创新方法来促进对当代全球环境治理的理解。该项目以2016年世界自然保护大会的案例研究为重点，考察了“绿色经济”的概念--如环境署领导的“绿色经济倡议”--是如何影响全球环境保护实践的。作为来自多个大学、国家和学科的研究人员协调努力的一部分，该项目加强了多国研究、培训和教学伙伴关系，以产生与政策相关的科学研究。它通过包括高级和初级学者以及来自两所文理学院和一所大型研究型大学的研究生和本科生的梯级指导，将研究和教育整合在全球环境治理创新方法和理论建设的发展中。通过对研究生和本科生进行严格的理论和方法培训，该项目帮助他们发展将地理概念和方法应用于紧迫的全球环境问题的技能和知识，同时让他们接触到潜在的环境研究和政策职业。通过阐明行为者如何影响全球环境治理的复杂性，它揭示了在关键历史时刻纠正看似棘手的环境危机和全球不平等的途径。该项目挑战了以国家为中心的全球环境治理的理解，并提出了关于当代治理如何发生的新理论。它用人种学数据加强了传统的基于实地的保护研究，以追踪全球保护政治中发生的范式转变。具体地说，该项目通过将国际会议作为关键场所，分析全球保护治理是如何在多个机构地点发生的，在这些场所，通常分散在时间和空间上的不同行为者聚集在一起进行谈判。它关注不同行为者使用的战略类型，以及会议规范、结构、可接受的知识形式和衡量标准如何塑造这些行为者互动和影响谈判的方式，揭示某些行为者如何以及为什么比其他行为者更有能力催化范式转变。归根结底，它记录了范式转变如何不仅通过官方话语、政策和法律发生，而且还通过公共、私人和非营利行为者之间更非正式的日常互动发生。

This project uses an innovative methodology called collaborative event ethnography to advance understanding of contemporary global environmental governance. Focusing on a case study of the 2016 World Conservation Congress, the project examines how notions of the "green economy", such as those inscribed in the UNEP-led Green Economy Initiative, are shaping global environmental conservation practices. As part of a coordinated effort among researchers from multiple universities, countries, and disciplines, the project strengthens multi-national research, training, and teaching partnerships in producing policy-relevant scientific research. It integrates research and education through cascade mentoring, which includes senior and junior scholars and graduate and undergraduate students, from two liberal arts colleges and a large research university in the development of innovative methodology and theory-building in global environmental governance. Through rigorous theoretical and methodological training for graduate and undergraduate students, the project helps them to develop the skills and knowledge to apply geographic concepts and methods to pressing global environmental issues, while simultaneously exposing them to potential careers in environmental research and policy. By illuminating the complexities of how actors influence global environmental governance, it reveals avenues for redressing seemingly intractable environmental crises and global inequality at a critical historical moment.The project challenges state-centric understandings of global environmental governance and advances new theories about how contemporary governance occurs. It augments traditional field-based studies of conservation with ethnographic data in order to trace how paradigm shifts occur in global conservation politics. Specifically, the project analyzes how global conservation governance transpires across multiple institutional sites by focusing on international conferences as key venues in which diverse actors, who are normally dispersed in time and space, convene to negotiate. It attends to the types of strategies that diverse actors use and the ways in which conference norms, structures, forms of acceptable knowledge and measurement shape the ways in which these actors interact and influence negotiations, revealing how and why certain actors are better able than others to catalyze paradigm shifts. Ultimately, it documents how paradigm shifts occur not only through official discourse, policy and law, but also through more informal, everyday interactions among public, private and non-profit actors.