This collaborative project involves an international team of researchers from several universities that will undertake a Collaborative Event Ethnography at the 10th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan, over 10 days in October 2010. Such meetings are sites or moments of negotiation and decision-making in on-going, broader policy-making processes, and they provide opportunities for researchers to examine how ideas about conservation emerge, gain traction, and are contested, debated and traded-off against one another.
Intellectual Merit This research probes the processes involved in determining what conservation is, who participates in such processes, and with what consequences. Researchers will engage in ethnographic research practices modified to reflect the untraditional nature of meetings as field sites. A collaborative team is better able than individual researchers to capture the dynamics of meetings and to address crosscutting themes. The proposal builds on experiences with and lessons learned from the first Cognitive Event Ethnography, undertaken at the 4th World Conservation Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 2008.
Potential Broader Impacts The core researchers will recruit a diverse team, including researchers from different disciplines, countries, genders and ethnicities. The diversity will serve to broaden participation in STEM areas. As a collaborative effort among multiple universities and across disciplines, the project will also serve to build and strengthen partnerships.
The research used an emerging method, Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE), to study the 10th Conference of the Parties (CoP10) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) held in October 2010. Meetings like CBD-CoP10 are moments of negotiation and decision-making in on-going, broader policy-making processes, where ideas about conservation emerge, gain traction, and are contested, debated and traded-off. The research explored what conservation is, who participates in defining it, and with what consequences. To do this, researchers engaged in ethnographic research practices – CEE – modified to reflect the untraditional nature of meetings as field sites. Working collaboratively, a team of 17 researchers was able to capture the dynamic of the meeting, and to: analyze the role of individuals and groups in shaping the ideological orientation of global environmental governance institutions like the CBD; document the social, political, and institutional mechanisms and processes used to legitimate and contest ideas about what conservation is; and relate team members’ individual research experiences of social-ecological dynamics in diverse locales around the world to the agendas established at CBD-CoP10. In addition, the research further developed the CEE method. The research produced critical insights into the transformation of environmental governance in the contemporary economic and political context. For example, the research documented a critical historical conjuncture at which institutions such as the CBD - one traditionally resistant to the subordination of nature to economy - has emerged as a proponent of market-based mechanisms for conservation. One particular manifestation of this is The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a report described at CoP10 as transforming how conservation will be accomplished. This shift in conservation governance requires the realignment of historically important conservation actors, such as conservation scientists, indigenous and local communities, and non-government organizations, with new actors in the business, media, entertainment and other industries. The research documented the role of metrics as key political and institutional mechanisms of the CBD. The importance of a number for expressing the value of biodiversity and its loss, for example, was crucial in promoting ecological economics as the tool for pursuing conservation. Negotiations over the CBD’s 2020 biodiversity targets similarly illustrated the complex role of metrics. Debate about the protected areas target, for example, were as much about what counts as protected as they were about how much should be protected. Thus an institutional mechanism for measuring progress was implicated in evolving and expanding the definition of what constitutes a protected area. Researchers gained new insights into their more traditional field sites. For example, one researcher was able to link the rapid expansion of protected areas in Madagascar at the end of 2010 to the new CBD protected areas target, as well as to the efforts of transnational non-government organizations at CoP10. Graduate students reframed their research projects based on the CBD experience. For example, one PhD student was intending to conduct research in Palau, Micronesia, to understand how regional conservation strategies interact with those of the state. Through her work at the CBD, she enhanced her understanding of regional strategies and was able to link these to international policy-making. While the need to link the ‘local’ to the ‘global’ is recognized among researchers, it is a methodological challenge. The research met the challenge through CEE, an innovative research method that recognizes the temporal and geographic complexity of social and political phenomena in a period of accelerating globalization. The CEE approach generated original, empirical data from events that are difficult to study, and the method itself broadens the scope of ethnographic research and definitions of ‘the field’. Refined and adapted ethnographic practice is necessary to address many pressing research problems that exceed the boundaries of more typically conceived field sites. The research built new and enhanced existing collaborations among US (4) and Canadian (3) universities, faculty (5), staff (1), postdoctoral researchers (4), students (6), and non-government organization professionals (1). Training included: a nine-week curriculum with readings to prepare for field-work, delivered via weekly webinars; working as a team, using shared observation guides and data collection protocols, to cover the actual meeting; and collaborating on outputs following the meeting, including collaborative data analysis and writing. A working structure that included sub-teams (n=11) headed by faculty and post-doctoral researchers provided the latter with opportunities to develop management and mentoring skills, as they coordinated data collection, analysis and writing for their sub-team. In addition to regular academic publications published and in preparation, articles have been published in the popular press read by conservation professionals, to extend the impacts of the research. All 6 graduate students have produced (2) or are completing (4) theses and dissertations that draw heavily on the CBD research. The CBD-CoP10 research team was diverse, with team members are from the United States, Canada, and Peru, the majority of whom were women (11 of 17).
