Abstract
AbstractThe 2010 Nagoya Protocol under the Convention on Biological Diversity and recent changes in the policies of major international conservation organizations highlight current interest in revisiting the moral case for conservation. Concerns with equity and human rights challenge well‐established notions of justice centered on human responsibility toward nature, the common good or the rights of future generations. This review introduces an empirical approach to the analysis of justice and shows how conservation scientists can apply it to ecosystem services‐based governance (or in short, ecosystem governance). It identifies dominant notions of justice and points out their compatibility with utilitarian theories of justice. It then discusses the limited appropriateness of these notions in many contexts in which conservation takes place in the Global South and explores how technical components of ecosystem governance influence the realization of the notions in practice. The review highlights the need for conservation scientists and managers to analyze the justice of ecosystem governance in addition to their effectiveness and efficiency. Justice offers a more encompassing perspective than equity for the empirical analysis of conservation governance.
Highlights
There are strong reasons to take a fresh look at justice in conservation
This applies to all forms of ecosystem governance, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), revenue-sharing mechanisms around protected areas, and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+)
This is important from a social perspective, as governance should be effective and efficient and just (e.g., Bremer et al 2014), and from an ecological perspective, because the environmental behavior of stakeholders is likely to depend on how they perceive the legitimacy and fairness of ecosystem governance (Pascual et al 2010; Muradian et al 2013)
Summary
There are strong reasons to take a fresh look at justice in conservation now. Most fundamentally, conservation remains a deeply ethical undertaking, having concerns for the common good, nature and the prospects of future generations at its core. Governance affects the distribution of benefits and duties among stakeholders and requires collective decisions about the objectives of conservation iand the methods to achieve these This is important from a social perspective, as governance should be effective and efficient and just (e.g., Bremer et al 2014), and from an ecological perspective, because the environmental behavior of stakeholders is likely to depend on how they perceive the legitimacy and fairness of ecosystem governance (Pascual et al 2010; Muradian et al 2013). An empirical approach recognizes the plurality of justice in the sense that more often than not, stakeholders do not agree on a single definition of what is morally right (Martin et al 2013b) Another key premise is that notions of justice are contextual and experiential, in the sense that they depend on the particular political and historical setting and by the kinds of resources and responsibilities to be shared (He & Sikor, under review). The review combines a novel theoretical argument for the relevance of justice analysis with purposefully selected examples from recent research on the social dynamics of ecosystem governance
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