New ERC project to delve into Conservation Data Justice 

Conservation Data Justice is becoming increasingly important, especially as the new "30 by 30" resolution from the recent Biodiversity Conference of Parties in Montreal takes effect. This calls for effective conservation action on 30% of the world's land and seas by 2030. But where should that conservation attention be directed? What might happen to people, and biodiversity, under different conservation regimes?

Answering these questions requires complex modelling work, which must involve many forms of data. However, all such data are likely to be flawed by different forms of bias, exclusion and omission. Insights from data justice research are therefore necessary to understand these dangers and how they might be counteracted. 

Data justice explores issues of recognition (who is excluded from the data), procedure (how the data are compiled), and distribution (what might the consequences of different plans be).

The CONDJUST project will interrogate conservation data and models and explore the epistemic communities producing them, to develop new theories of socially just, data-driven conservation. It will challenge the colonising tendencies of prioritisation work and seek decolonising alternatives.   

This project, which has only just begun, is now laying the ground for future activities. The project will allow for the recruitment of pre-doctoral staff who will be contributing to this project, and Dan Brockington, alongside Rosaleen Duffy, is organising an advanced post-graduate workshop for this September. In a couple of months, the four postdoctoral positions attached to this project will be announced, and a network of Conservation Data Justice scholars have started to put together the invitation for a Conservation Data Justice Symposium that will take place in May 2024.      

"We therefore anticipate a lot of interest in this work, as this is a rapidly growing field", says project leader Dan Brockington, who says that so far, both the PhD announcement and the call for the workshop have attracted considerable interest, with the advertisement for the PhD being downloaded by over 1900 potential applicants. 

Dan Brockington trained as an anthropologist in UCL with Kathy Homewood and worked previously in the Geography Departments of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (on a post-doc with Bill Adams), in the Global Development Institute at Manchester, and the Institute of Global Sustainable International Development at the University of Sheffield, which he co-directed with Dorothea Kleine. He has been working on different aspects of conservation social science for some time, covering the social impacts of conservation policy, global overviews of eviction from protected areas, continental wide examinations of the work of conservation NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa, and the work of media and celebrities in conservation and development. 

His books include Fortress Conservation, Nature Unbound (with Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe), Celebrity Advocacy and International Development, Celebrity and the Environment, and he recently published Prosperity in Rural Africa? (with Christine Noe) and Contested Sustainability (with Stefano Ponte and Christine Noe). He was awarded an Advanced ERC to work on Conservation Data Justice in April 2022 and an ICREA research professorship in July of the same year. He serves on the board of the NGO “Micaia” and recently completed a fictional trilogy for middle-grade readers that will be published by APE network in Dar es Salaam.