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在过去二十年中如何在保护主义者中获得广泛的传播。它将阐明如何解释其不断扩大的影响力，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参与其中的人意味着什么。该项目将侧重于框架核心拥护者的经验，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、参与性观察和嵌入的组织民族志，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的保护从业者中进行。除了试图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，提供讲座以及与研究助理合作来介入对话。调查结果将通过出版物、会议、主持生态系统服务问题讨论的博客、大众媒体的社论以及向有关环境组织提供志愿援助等方式传播。本项目扩展了科学技术研究、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。虽然已有研究分析了受生态系统服务启发而出台政策的特定地点，但本项目旨在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单个生态系统服务项目转移到上游的认知斗争。它将有助于学术辩论，探讨市场逻辑与环境保护主义日益交织的问题；新自由化与商品化的文化政治；变革的推动者如何在激进政治与改革政治的希望和危险之间进行谈判；思想和跨国认知网络影响制度变革的能力；以及从这些动态中产生和构成的权力关系。该项目将为使话语制度化为政策和实践的机制和条件提供新的见解，并将产生关于生态系统服务的设想和实施方式的新知识。

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.