World Conservation Congress

Our series aims to bring together research on the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability: on local and global understandings of the concept and on lived practices around the world. It publishes studies which use ethnography to help us understand emerging ways of living, acting, and thinking sustainably. The books in this series also investigate and shed light on the political dynamics of resource governance and various scientific cultures of sustainability.

The modern idea that species and habitats should be protected by legislation has its origins in measures to control access to and to preserve game, and was well established in British and other colonies by the end of the nineteenth century. Preservationists were inspired by the example of Yellowstone (1872) and other national parks in the United States, as well as by the extensive network of forest reserves in India and similar models of territorial protection. As the twentieth century progressed, increasing numbers of parks and reserves were gazetted in countries around the world, often combining the conservation of flora and fauna with the generation of revenues from tourism and other sources. The growth of environmentalism and the institution of a global conservation regime by the United Nations after the end of World War II stimulated the further proliferation of protected areas, a pattern boosted in recent decades by the development of community-based and other modes of decentralized governance (Adams 2004). The world's conservation estate continues to expand and evolve: the 2014 United Nations List of Protected Areas included information on 209,429 designated terrestrial and marine protected areas, covering a total of 32,868,673 square kilometers, equivalent to 17.4 percent of the earth's surface (Deguignet et al. 2014).

Citing multiple threats to marine biodiversity and resources, the international marine conservation community is promoting greater adoption of marine protected areas (MPAs). Like terrestrial protected areas, MPAs are characterised by debates over the appropriate role for scientific input and citizen participation and how to balance concerns for both social equity and ecological effectiveness. This paper explores how such debates are influencing the framing of MPAs as a global policy tool, based on an 'event ethnography' conducted at the 2008 World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. International non-governmental organisations (NGOs) dominated the discussions and agenda setting, although multiple concerns for MPAs were incorporated into the discussions. The framing of MPAs highlighted a global scale and vision, reflected by and reinforcing the dominant role of the big NGOs. However, it did not go unchallenged, nor is it prescriptive.

Outlines the origins of the World Conservation Strategy and the aims and principles underlying it. The main aim is to foster “sustainable development through the conservation of living resources”. However, the conservation goal defined in the Strategy document is insufficiently specific to be operational. Many of the wider conservational issues, as for example raised in the writings of Daly, are not considered in the Strategy document but it is clear that long-term conservational issues cannot be discussed rationally unless attention is given to moral philosophy and the ultimate aims of mankind. Nevertheless even if a shorter-term perspective is taken, economic development may be assisted by
1. the maintenance of essential ecological processes and life support systems;
2. the preservation of genetic diversity, and
3. the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems; each of which is advanced in the World Conservation Strategy as an important objective.
This paper is critical, however, of a number of the policy recommendations that are made (such as the reservation of good cropland, specific priorities in saving species and in the type of design for nature reserves, suggested levels of utilization of species) and suggests that economic trade-off problems are largely ignored. There is also some discussion of the progress that has been made in drawing up a National Conservation Strategy for Australia.

This article explores the meaning of inclusive participation in global conservation decision-making processes. It draws on data collected in collaborative ethnographic research of the latest World Conservation Congress (WCC) held in 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. We argue that despite a discernible shift towards the incorporation of indigenous rights and indigenous peoples' representatives within the conservation equation, many challenges to full participation still exist for both indigenous peoples and other local resource users who may be affected by conservation governance decisions. Several conditions exist at a global scale that limit democratic participation, including the unequal power relations between indigenous peoples and the global north, which limits the space for indigenous inclusion, the democratic deliberation that is often treated as a checkbox item, the limited resources to facilitate broad inclusion (in terms of both monetary and cultural capital), and the political challenges of legitimacy for some at more local scales, such as the concern of who represents whom at the global scale. We recognise effort has been given to expanded participation in global conservation governance, but inclusive and deliberative participation is still limited within IUCN and among other conservation NGOs.