Environmental geographer Camille Venier-Cambron explored ways to integrate local justice in the field of conservation planning.
The field of conservation science has continuously evolved to meet changing societal needs. Recent times have seen a shift towards rights-based conservation approaches. However, mainstream conservation planning tools may not be well suited to delivering these goals.
In her research, Venier-Cambron assesses whether common approaches may inadvertently generate inequitable outcomes, as well as how we might include local land-use needs into a global planning frameworks. Doing so demonstrates the potential to consider explicit dimensions of both justice and burden-sharing. This is followed with an examination of what kinds of mechanisms are available for ensuring that global environmental agendas are implemented in a way that meets our normative objectives, highlighting the difficulty of accounting for the politics of land. Finally, she uses a transformation framework to explore a potential pathway to a future that is both just and biodiverse.
Safeguarding the right to a healthy environment
The study considers the way that global conservation planning can be disconnected from local land-use needs. This can lead to unjust outcomes if large-scale agendas are imposed at the expense of local realities. But this doesn’t need to be the case. There is even potential for large-scale agendas to help local struggles for justice, as both biodiversity loss and environmental justice struggles face common threats and common solutions. Indeed, the conservation community increasingly recognizes the value of a rights-based approach to conservation, which seeks to protect biodiversity by safeguarding the right of all people to a safe and healthy environment.
In her thesis, Venier-Cambron explores ways to integrate local justice concerns into global planning frameworks. She examines the means and challenges of ensuring that global normative agendas are implemented in a just and effective manner. This requires being explicit about our assumptions and objectives, moving away from technocratic solutions.
Acceptable solutions
Biodiversity loss is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. As such, there has been a strong focus on multilateral agendas for tackling this global issue. Global coordination is important for addressing these challenges, but the way conservation is discussed and the types of solutions that are seen as legitimate must be in line with the needs of the people and places for which they are prescribed. This has not always been the case, given the colonial context in which conservation emerged. However, the field has since evolved with a contemporary focus on rights-based approaches. Even so, justice is not always considered in mainstream planning frameworks or agenda targets, which often inherit certain assumptions about biodiversity and land. It is therefore important to find ways of expanding the field in a justice-oriented direction, as well as shifting the range of acceptable solutions in international discourse.
Venier-Cambron used a variety of methodologies, including spatial analysis, land-use modelling, qualitative comparative analysis, and a futuring framework.
More information on the thesis
