Conservation, Markets and Justice: a comparative study of local and global conceptions

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Forest conservation initiatives are often driven by motives that arise at national and even global levels. These include the preservation of valuable resources for the national economy, the conservation of biological diversity and, increasingly, the mitigation of climate change through enhanced storage of carbon in forest biomass. Whilst conservation is largely framed in terms of global goods, including for future generations, there is increasing agreement that these interests should not prejudice the needs and rights of current people who live within or adjacent to those forests targeted for conservation. This is a very important challenge that is currently being faced by all those governments, NGOs and public policy-making institutions that are implementing forest conservation in the tropics through support for protected areas, REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and other conservation mechanisms. The UK government is itself strongly involved in REDD+, as are many international conservation NGOs such as Fauna and Flora International and WWF. This research project will seek to contribute to the challenge to reconcile forest conservation for all, with social justice for local people in developing countries. To do so, the project will generate new empirical data about what social justice means to these local people and work with donors, NGOs and policy-makers at national and international levels to bring this new knowledge into practice. The project will conduct research in three countries, China, Tanzania and Venezuela. In each country we have selected study sites that represent two different categories of forest conservation intervention: those that are community-oriented and those that have also taken on more market-oriented approaches. Thus we have comparisons across different countries and across different governance models of forest intervention. In each site we will research local conceptions of environmental justice, for example what different groups of local people consider to be the fairest way of making decisions about forest management options, and what they consider to be the fairest way of distributing the costs and benefits associated with any intervention. Because so little is known about local conceptions of justice, and there are no established methodologies for researching this, we will employ a combination of methods that provide us with opportunities for comparing findings and for validation of results. We will test for the presence of some well known principles of justice using surveys and experimental economic games. But we will also employ more open, ethnographic methods, inlcuding interviews and participatory video, for a more inductive approach to identifying justice norms. During year 1 we will hold a field-based methods inception workshop to pilot and finalise all methods as a team.In addition to comparisons across countries and across intervention type, a central thrust of our research will be to compare local conceptions of justice with those that are evident in the conservation interventions in that particular site. In that way, we will be investigating any areas of divergence and seeking to understand how this impacts on local receptivity to the intervention. In other words, we will be looking at divergence and convergence between different stakeholders' conceptions of justice and fairness, as a basis for understanding conservation conflicts and cooperation. The demand for this research has arisen through previous collaborative engagement with NGO actors in the the field sites themselves and through UK-based events we have organised, bringing together academics and practitioners interested in justice-oriented approaches to forest and biodiversity conservation approaches. We will continue this engagement with key conservation stakeholders such as IUCN and WWF to ensure that this new knowledge informs new practices.