Abstract
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ is arguably the most widely recognised tool for assessing species' global conservation status. Given the potential social impact of Red Lists, this research aimed at understanding which kinds of data and expertise flow into the assessments, and what role they play in the process. Informed by theoretical approaches from political ecology and science and technology studies, two recently compiled Red Lists were examined as a case, directly interviewing and surveying the central actors of the Red List process, i.e. scientific experts. By adopting a broad definition of expertise, this study showed that a variety of local expertise (local resource users, resident professionals, and citizen scientists) contributes to Red List assessments, but in a less evident way, and always hierarchically following validation by scientific experts. Resident professionals provided crucial information on all aspects of the Red List; local resource users and citizen scientists played a minor role, except for information regarding plant use and species distribution, respectively. Interviews revealed existing hierarchies of knowledge, in which experts with natural science backgrounds decide over what counts as evidence and whose knowledge counts. Recommendations are made on how local expertise can meaningfully contribute to Red Lists.
Highlights
Awareness about the need to broaden the knowledge base that global environmental governance draws upon is increasing (Jasanoff and Martello 2004)
By adopting a broad definition of expertise, this study showed that a variety of local expertise contributes to Red List assessments, but in a less evident way, and always hierarchically following validation by scientific experts
For the purpose of this study, local expertise was seen as holding primarily locally specific knowledge which tends to remain contextualised in the area where it was produced; scientific expertise we considered as characterised by building on locally based knowledge from many places, summarising and integrating the information, i.e. de-contextualising it from the place where it was produced
Summary
Awareness about the need to broaden the knowledge base that global environmental governance draws upon is increasing (Jasanoff and Martello 2004). Science is losing its legitimacy as the only provider of environmental knowledge and while it remains central to natural resource management, it is becoming just one contribution among many others Services (IPBES) (Turnhout et al 2012) Despite this general trend towards the opening up of knowledge systems, one of the most widely relied-upon tools in conservation planning, the IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM, remains hesitant to formally open up to multiple knowledges. Red List assessments are produced by scientific expert networks collaborating with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
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