Towards Just Conservation

Environmental justice scholarship has been growing as an important framework to look at the main development challenges of our time. It has been increasingly applied in research projects across the Global South, particularly on the analysis of international programmes aimed, for instance, at climate change mitigation or nature conservation. In this seminar, I will discuss recent field research that I have been conducting across Africa and South America, along with some colleagues, to understand how we can make conservation more socially just. Making conservation more just is an intrinsically desirable thing to do. But if further reason is needed, I argue that it is also the most effective way to pursue conservation objectives. This requires us to further understand and integrate local conceptions of justice, which can differ from norms embedded in global policy in important ways. Markets can change local justice norms by changing social relations of production. Commercialisation and market-based conservation can provide opportunities for local people to pursue justice but invariably impose challenges and create conflicts About the speaker Adrian Martin is a professor of Environment and Development at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia. His research interests include environmental justice and environmental conflicts. His main focus in recent years has been on the tensions between conservation and livelihoods, especially in sub saharan Africa. In the mid 1990s he researched JFPM in the Western Ghats of Karnataka and is very pleased to be returning to the area after a long absence