Studying Sea Turtle Conservation and Learning about the World: Insights from Social Science

Lisam Campbell

doi:10.4103/0972-4923.62671

Abstract

This special issue of Conservation & Society focuses on sea turtles and their conservation, from various social science perspectives. While there are other collections of papers devoted to sea turtle conservation from non-biological perspectives, and some of the individual contributions are by social scientists 1 , the present issue is timely, distinct, and valuable, for two reasons. First, social science has come of age in the sea turtle research and conservation community. The annual International Sea Turtle Symposium has progressed from the days when a single social science research presentation was noteworthy (e.g., Tambiah 1995) to those when a dedicated social science session is the default (and minimum) presence. This expansion is accounted for mostly by graduate students tackling important questions about human relationships with sea turtles, the design and implementation of conservation interventions, and their impacts on human communities and social-economic structures. Having long argued that sea turtle conservation needs more social science (Campbell 2003), I am happy to report that there has been progress on this front, and this special issue captures only a small fraction of the work being done. Second, an issue featuring social science research on sea turtles and their conservation is about much more than sea turtles. Sea turtle conservation provides a platform from which researchers can ask questions of interest to a broad audience concerned with the human aspects of wildlife conservation. But that platform is arguably unique because sea turtles are, quite simply, special. Charismatic species of international conservation concern, they inspire hundreds of organisations and hundreds of thousands of individuals, attract resources and attention, and are subject to conservation instruments devoted solely to them. Things ‘happen’ on the ground because of sea turtles, and these actions have the potential to alter human-environment relations both in water and on land. The ‘happenings’ related to sea turtles are many and diverse; so are the questions of critical interest to social scientists. For example, when the importance of sea turtles to the diets of Caribbean Nicaraguans changes, partly as a result of interventions by conservationists, what other changes

Highlights

Studying Sea Turtle Conservation and Learning about the World: Insights from Social Science Lisa M
Sea turtle conservation provides a platform from which researchers can ask questions of interest to a broad audience concerned with the human aspects of wildlife conservation
While the number of social science researchers studying issues related to sea turtle conservation is increasing, many of them are relatively new scholars, without a publishing track record

Summary

Introduction

Studying Sea Turtle Conservation and Learning about the World: Insights from Social Science. The annual International Sea Turtle Symposium has progressed from the days when a single social science research presentation was noteworthy (e.g., Tambiah 1995) to those when a dedicated social science session is the default (and minimum) presence. ‘Are current conservation models working?’; ‘Under what conditions (ecological, environmental, social and political) can consumptive use of sea turtles be sustained?’; and ‘How can fisheries be managed to reduce bycatch and still remain viable and productive?’ While these meta-questions are broad, the relative paucity of social science questions generated through the Top 20 exercise flies in the face of what many conservation practitioners and academics have been arguing for decades: that social, political, cultural, legal, and economic issues—the so-called human dimensions—are at least as, and often more, important than biological or ecological ones in influencing conservation 1999; Ludwig et al 1993)

The relatively minor attention given to social science in the

By publishing the current collection of papers in Conservation