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.
