Seeing like a smartphone: The co-production of landscape-scale and rights-based conservation

Abstract

Landscape approaches are heralded as ways to advance more effective and equitable social-ecological governance by working across economic sectors and stakeholder groups. There remains a need, however, to understand how they are enacted in particular contexts, how rights-based efforts are pursued within them, and what this means for the protection of community rights. Developed in partnership by The Nature Conservancy and the Berau district government, the Berau Forest Carbon Program (BFCP) uses a landscape approach to advance REDD+ policy in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Drawing on 26 months of ethnographic research across international, national, subnational, and village governance levels, I find the BFCP aligns with Indonesia’s national vision of green growth. Focusing on the BFCP’s rights-based instrument known as SIGAP, I find that it enacts and facilitates that green growth vision both through forest governance policy and as a malleable Foucauldian “technology of power.” Tracing how SIGAP has expanded over time from a community engagement protocol to become a multi-stakeholder platform and social media app, this work empirically documents how landscape-scale and rights-based conservation agendas recursively influence each other and that this dynamic co-production illuminates important tensions between rights-based agendas and projects of environmental governance. One example of such a tension is how the development and use of the SIGAP app is shown to preclude the recognition and discussion of stakeholder conflict and in so doing undermine community rights. Ultimately, this article presents a valuable case study for thinking through the diverse kinds of work rights-based instruments can do and centers the need for conservationists to recognize rights-based approaches not as technical toolkits but rather governance mechanisms to be considered and navigated appropriately.