Collaborative Event Ethnography Research Articles

Agrarianizing climate accords & discord: food, agriculture & agrarian movements at UNFCCC Conference of the Parties

ABSTRACT How do agrarian justice movements factor into the UNFCCC annual global climate Conference of the Parties (COP)? How have they appeared and erupted, been excluded, appropriated, and barely allowed – over the years, and, in particular, at the 2022 COP27 and 2023 COP28? This paper asks and begins to answer these overlooked questions. In the heads-of-state negotiations, transnational agrifood, land, and labour issues do not take centre stage explicitly, but retain their power as irrefutable crises; agri-food topics finally commanded prominence as crux to climate governance – yet ripe for corporate capture . In the accords themselves, agrarian mobilizations again serve as the backdrop, marginalized via scalar and developmental discourses, epistemic devaluation, and political economies of agro-corporate dominance. In the actual conference, land-based, campesina/peasant/farmworker coalitions participate through the channels of Approved NGO Observer Organizations. Indigenous nations, at the heart of agrarian movements garner limited recognition of their outsized efficacy at agro/biodiversity stewardship and thus climate justice and survival. Yet, from these contested peripheries, agrarian struggles nevertheless manage to command attention, forge transnational coalitions, and, against great odds, set key terms for the COP talks themselves. Drawing on collaborative event ethnography and policy analysis, this paper traces the contours of this improbable – yet, from the long durée vantage: foreseeable – dynamic of agrarian coalition power expanding from the marginalized majority, at COP27, COP28, and beyond.

Expert Authority Politics in the Marine Biodiversity Complex

Abstract The negotiations for a new instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of high-seas marine biodiversity (marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction; BBNJ) finally concluded after difficult negotiations. The BBNJ negotiations had to address a regime complex of sectoral and regional organizations regulating different aspects of marine biodiversity and a political struggle about the epistemologies that ought to inform marine biodiversity governance, which is driven by limited, unequally distributed, and contested knowledge. However, to be implemented, the new BBNJ Agreement will have to be equipped with expert authority to be able to address these challenges and make competent statements about the state of high-seas marine biodiversity. We address a gap in empirical work on expert authority in the regime complex by analyzing state references to the expertise of different international organizations in the BBNJ negotiations. Combining collaborative event ethnography and social network analysis, we show that states strategically and politically refer to the expertise of international organizations, and we coin the term authority shopping to describe this behavior.

For love and money: Navigating values at the antiques roadshow event

AbstractAntiques Roadshow Events are held in historic locations across the United Kingdom. On site, experts evaluate objects brought in by attendees, who are often cast as passive recipients, while edited highlights make up the long‐running BBC TV program. Through Collaborative Event Ethnography at one Roadshow Event we show how object stories are navigated through “value talk” between attendees and experts in front of live audiences. Value is not a measurement but a dimension of the thing and its context. Stories and money are both integral in understanding worth, and final valuations are only partially shaped by given expertise.

Configuring the field of global marine biodiversity conservation

IntroductionThe article describes and analyzes the emergence of the field of global marine biodiversity conservation over the past fifteen years. We draw on collaborative research at international meetings, which we position as ‘field’ sites, places where diverse actors come together to negotiate the meaning and terms of global environmental governance and where that work is accessible and visible to researchers.MethodsBased on Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE), a method developed to facilitate study of large meetings, we mobilize research from seven meetings since 2008 to describe the field of global marine biodiversity conservation, but more importantly to specifying how that field has been configured.ResultsWe identify practices of orchestration, narrative, performance, alliance, social objects, devices, and technologies, formal outcomes, and formal procedures, and their use at three phases of field configuration: building, framing, and bounding.DiscussionThe results: 1) enhance our understanding of the role of international conferences in global environmental governance generally, and for marine biodiversity conservation specifically; 2) demonstrate the relevance of field and field configuration theory; 3) contribute to theory on institutional fields by specifying practices of field configuration.

Beyond AOSIS: small island states’ presence and participation at COP27

ABSTRACT Small islands are at the frontline of climate change – and of climate negotiations. Yet while the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has allowed small islands to collectively become a key player in UN climate negotiations, a focus on the group level masks important inequalities within AOSIS. This paper hence goes beyond the level of AOSIS to understand the power and agency of small island states in the global climate regime. We are interested in how islands experience and navigate the complex and unequal climate negotiations, and specifically explore the presence and participation of individual small island states at COP27. Drawing mainly on collaborative event ethnography at COP27, our analysis shows indeed stark differences across island states. Whether we look at mere presence, participation in formal negotiations or engagement ‘on the sides’, we notice that some island states are much more active than others, as a result of not only different capacities but also and importantly because of the personal commitment and engagement of individual island negotiators. Overall, this seems to reflect cultural and power inequalities within the group, but does not detract from AOSIS' overall success, as seen in the long-sought fund for loss and damage adopted at COP27.

Negotiating regime complexity: Following a regime complex in the making

AbstractThis article broadens the understanding and empirical study of regime complexes by shifting the focus from the negotiation outcome to the processes of negotiating new international agreements. Although they are important to regime-complex formation and delimitation, the sites where states negotiate new agreements are rather neglected. We aim to enhance the methodological toolbox available to scholars studying global governance in two ways: (1) by demonstrating how dynamic relationships between states and international organisations (IOs) unfolding within the social space of international treaty negotiations contribute to regime-complex formation; and (2) how social network analysis (SNA) can help us to detect patterns in these relationships. Combining participant observation and collaborative event ethnography (CEE) with social network analysis, we present new empirical material illustrating how we delimited a regime complex and how IOs interact throughout the negotiation process. We applied our methodology to the case of marine-biodiversity governance and use observational data collected during three intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) (2018–19) on a new treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) for our analysis. We discuss the results in relation to our approach’s strengths and weaknesses and implications for future research on regime complexity.

A song in a cold place: the role of emotions in motivating youth activism and advancing justice at the COP

ABSTRACT The emotions of youth climate justice activists are often demeaned or misrepresented both by popular media and by COP organisers. The COP itself, as a cold, bureaucratic, and repressive space that tokenises frontline voices to create an optics of care, is a source of frustration and disappointment for many youth activists. Despite this misrepresentation and repression, youth activists use their emotions to strengthen their movements and actions at the COP. Drawing on collaborative event ethnography spanning a decade, this paper analyses how Global South youth climate justice activists strategically navigate and channel emotion through acts of emotional solidarity, emotional concealment, and emotional display. We assess how youth activists’ complex emotional experiences exist in generative tension within individuals and within the youth climate justice movement. Our findings suggest that their emotional strategies unlock the capacity for exercising power while cultivating relationships necessary for climate justice.

Deploying an Ethnographic Sensibility to Understand Climate Change Governance: Hanging Out, Around, In, and Back

AbstractWhat can an “ethnographic sensibility” contribute to research on climate change governance? With its emphasis on meaning making and understanding what may lie beneath more obvious interactions and processes, ethnographic methodologies, particularly collaborative event ethnography, are increasingly deployed to address complex questions and achieve conceptual leverage on issues related to climate governance. Drawing on literature in climate anthropology, material geography, and political ethnography, and with examples from our own fieldwork experiences, we devise a heuristic typology underpinned by an ethnographic sensibility to help guide the fieldwork phase of a research project. Building on the well-established practice of hanging out, we introduce hanging around, which attends to spatiality and matter; hanging in, which addresses issues of access and trust; and hanging back to guide the practice of reflexivity. We articulate what fieldwork with an ethnographic sensibility entails and discuss its potential and implications for climate governance research.

Subcultural variability and protean-identification in gun culture

ABSTRACT Gun culture in the Unites States is enmeshed in controversy, and is frequently described as a monolithic, static construct. In this paper, we argue that instead, gun culture is a fluid and fragmented collective of multiple subcultures that overlap, contradict, and coexist. Based on data collected through a collaborative event ethnography (CEE) at gun shows, we found that while gun collective members do strongly identify with gun culture, they also disidentify, schizo-identify, multi-identify, and change their identifications across multiple subcultures. In this way, people engage in protean identification, constantly changing arrays of organizational identifications. Ultimately, these contributions are useful for understanding stigmatized, hidden, or highly complex collectives and have practical implications for gun policy.

Navigating the spaces between human rights and justice: cultivating Indigenous representation in global environmental governance

ABSTRACT How and in what ways do ‘marginalized' actors influence global environmental governance? Through a collaborative event ethnography of the Paris Climate Summit (COP21), we examine power as it emerges through interactions between actors, institutions, and spaces, focusing on Indigenous Peoples’ engagement at the international treaty negotiations. The findings show how Indigenous Peoples generate new meanings and avenues for their pursuits of justice by contesting the production of various forms of rights. In doing so, Indigenous delegates situate power through the politics of representation, carving out distinct political roles in international arenas.

Qualifying tradition: Instituted practices in the making of the organic wine market in Languedoc‐Roussillon, France

AbstractWithin France, the Languedoc‐Roussillon region (now part of Occitanie) is home to about one third of the nation's area of certified organic vineyards. Each year, the world's largest organic wine fair, Millésime Bio, takes place in the city of Montpellier. This trade fair is an important site where organic wine is not only sold but also given meaning in the market, and importantly, differentiated from but made commensurate with conventional wine. In this paper, we examine processes and practices of ‘qualifying’ organic wine, including by means of relational processes of association and dissociation. Drawing on collaborative event ethnography and other qualitative methods, we focus on individual and institutional actors engaged in creating forms of commodified meanings that circulate with organic wine. In Languedoc‐Roussillon, these meanings reflect and reinforce a longer‐term so‐called shift to quality in wine production, yet also emphasize continuity over change, particularly through emphasis on ongoing role of artisanal, independent growers. We argue that qualification thereby works not only through association with independent growers but also by dissociation, specifically from Languedoc‐Roussillon's agrarian tradition of generic wine production and from the central role played by wine cooperatives in the social reproduction of the region's small‐holding grower class.

Doing feminist collaborative event ethnography

Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made important theoretical interventions in the interdisciplinary community of political ecologists, but the use of feminist methodologies and 'team-based environmental science' can be expanded. We argue that revisiting feminist methodological commitments is critical for furthering how feminist political ecology examines how, and in what way, power and privilege operate in the contexts where environmental knowledge is produced. We make our argument by drawing upon a multi-year, multi-sited project to describe how collaborative event ethnography (CEE) offers many possibilities to reassess feminist political ecology research designs. We show how the recognition of diverse and plural epistemologies are foundational preconditions to integrating feminist principles in feminist political ecology research. We find that integrating reflexivity, responsibility, and co-production in research designs create opportunities for, and challenges to, carrying out feminist political ecological practice. In so doing, the integration of feminist methodologies are critical to disrupting knowledge hegemonies and providing new modes of practicing feminist political ecologies.Keywords: Collaborative event ethnography, feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies, global environmental governance

From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages.Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples

Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference

<p>The 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) Conference was the fourth and biggest meeting on IWT convened at the initiative of the UK Government. Using a collaborative event ethnography, we examine the Conference as a site where key actors defined the problem of IWT as one of serious crime that needs to be addressed as such. We ask (a) how was IWT framed as serious crime, (b) how was this framing mobilized to promote particular policy responses, and (c) how did the framing and suggested responses reflect the privileging of elite voices? Answering these questions demonstrates the expanding ways in which thinking related to crime and policing are an increasingly forceful dynamic shaping conservation-related policy at the global level. We argue that the conservation-crime convergence on display at the 2018 London IWT Conference is characteristic of a conservation policy landscape that increasingly promotes and privileges responses to IWT that are based on legal and judicial reform, criminal investigations, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement technologies. Marginalized are those voices that seek to address the underlying drivers of IWT by promoting solutions rooted in sustainable livelihoods in source countries and global demand reduction. We suggest that political ecology of conservation and environmental crime would benefit from greater engagement with critical criminology, a discipline that critically interrogates the uneven power dynamics that shape ideas of crime, criminality, how they are politicized, and how they frame policy decisions. This would add further conceptual rigor to political ecological work that deconstructs conservation and environmental crime.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>illegal wildlife trade, poaching, conservation, crime, event ethnography, criminology</p>

Benefits, Challenges, and Disincentives of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Research consistently demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. It has also become common for universities to encourage their faculty to engage in interdisciplinary and collaborative research. However, there are several challenges and disincentives to this type of work. In this article, we draw on a single case study of a project employing interdisciplinary collaborative event ethnography (CEE) to demonstrate the benefits, challenges, and disincentives of this approach to research. We highlight the enhanced and nuanced outcomes achieved through interdisciplinary collaboration that would likely not have been achieved through an intradisciplinary approach to the research questions. The case study also highlights the challenges and disincentives associated with this research strategy, including longer work times, difficulty in publishing due to editorial and reviewer criticism about violating methods preferences or disciplinary boundaries, and issues related to publications outside of one’s field. We conclude with a call to enhance the incentives associated with interdisciplinary collaborative research.

Doing Strong Collaborative Fieldwork in Human Geography

Although increasingly common in the academy, collaboration is not yet the norm in human geography. Drawing on insights from ten years of experience with collaborative event ethnography (CEE), we argue that strong approaches to collaborative fieldwork offer rich opportunities for human geography. CEE involves teams of researchers conducting fieldwork together at large international events, collaborating on all aspects of the research process from research design to analysis and writing. This paper considers the benefits and challenges of CEE. Some of the benefits associated with strong collaborative fieldwork include: robust, collective interpretation of embodied data that makes room for difference; intellectual and social support for individual researchers; professional development and mentoring; and adaptability. Challenges encompass: Collectively interpreting data produced through individual, embodied experiences; managing team dynamics related to seniority, gender, and disciplinary training; meeting professional and institutional expectations and norms; valuing and recognizing individual contributions; and ensuring sufficient funding to support team preparation, data collection, and analysis. Strong collaborative approaches to fieldwork, like CEE, can cultivate slow scholarship and innovative knowledge production.

Seeking procedural equity in global environmental governance: Indigenous participation and knowledge politics in forest and landscape restoration debates at the 2016 World Conservation Congress

The importance of meaningful participation of Indigenous Peoples in global environmental governance is widely recognised. Yet, debates persist on the extent to which Indigenous perspectives and interests are included in environmental decision-making, including concerns about what constitutes procedural equity, issues of participation asymmetry, and hierarchies in forms of knowledge. While these questions have been extensively explored at the local governance level, the ways in which current structures of decision-making at the global level shape Indigenous participation and knowledge remains under-examined. The IUCN, World Conservation Congress (WCC) is a key site of global environmental decision-making. This paper examines how prevailing structures of power at the most recent (2016) WCC shape Indigenous participation and use of Indigenous knowledge, and thus procedural equity in this policy context. We examine participation and knowledge in relation to debates and discussions about forest and landscape restoration (FLR). We applied Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) methodology to collect data over 10-day intensive period. This included i) semi-structured interviews with 17 Congress participants, including Indigenous Peoples' representatives, international non-governmental organisation (INGO) and non-governmental organisation (NGO) specialists, and state agency representatives and ii) participant observation at 27 events relating to forest and landscape restoration. Our findings show that the structure of the WCC upheld prevailing power relations among actors and more powerful actors hold limited views about what constitute meaningful participation and pervasive view of Indigenous knowledge as a supplementary knowledge form in FLR debates. This study makes visible the ways by which prevailing structures of power within global environmental governance shapes access, consideration of different knowledge forms and thus procedural equity in the context of FLR debates.

Queue-munity engagement: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Antiques Roadshow in Kent

Using Collaborative Event Ethnography as a research method, a team of 21 researchers conducted fieldwork at the Antiques Roadshow in Ightham Mote, Kent. This article reflects on the experience of queuing at the event and how it was experienced and discussed by researchers and participants. Drawing upon Mol, the article approaches the practice of queuing as involving an inherent multiplicity of often contradictory experiences through which idealised, Second World War-related understandings of British queuing practice are simultaneously confirmed and challenged. Through multiple participants viewing the queue from within and outside we were able to capture the processes of community-building, curation, management, rule-maintenance and rule-bending within the social life of the queue. In demonstrating this multiplicity Collaborative Event Ethnography is shown to be an excellent research tool for capturing short-term, large-scale events while also highlighting the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of social interactions and social norms within queues.

Assembling global conservation governance

As the configuration of global environmental governance has become more complex over the past fifty years, numerous scholars have underscored the importance of understanding the transnational networks of public, private and nonprofit organizations that comprise it. Most methodologies for studying governance emphasize social structural elements or institutional design principles and focus less attention on the social interactions that generate diffuse, hybrid regimes. Yet capturing the dynamics of these networks requires a relational methodology that can account for a range of elements that constantly shift and change relative to overlapping institutional boundaries. Collaborative Event Ethnography draws on insights from multi-sited, team, and institutional ethnography to assemble teams of researchers to study major international conferences, which offer important political spaces where public, private, and nonprofit actors align around sanctioned logics and techniques of governance. Drawing on insights generated from these conferences and field sites across the globe, we trace the constitutive forces behind paradigm shifts in biodiversity conservation, specifically the interconnected rise of market-based approaches, global targets, and new conservation enclosures. We show how the iterative refining of the methodology over five events generated an increasingly robust understanding of global conservation governance as processual, dynamic, and contingent, constituted through constantly shifting assemblages of state and nonstate actors, devices and narratives that collectively configure fields of governance. Finally, we reflect on how our team, as an evolving combination of researchers, research interests, and data collection tools—itself an assemblage, —has informed the continual refinement of the methodology and generated novel understandings of global conservation governance.

Making Influence Visible: Innovating Ethnography at the Paris Climate Summit

Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and were prominent actors at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, COP21, they remain largely invisible in conventional, mainstream, and academic accounts of COP21. In this article, we adopt feminist collaborative event ethnography to draw attention to often marginalized and unrecognized actors and help make visible processes that are often invisible in the study of power and influence at sites of global environmental governance. Specifically, we integrate current approaches to power from international relations and political ecology scholarship to investigate how Indigenous Peoples, critical actors for solving global environmental challenges, access, navigate, and cultivate power at COP21 to shape global environmental governance. Through conceptual and methodological innovations that illuminate how Indigenous Peoples overcome structural and spatial barriers to engagement, this article demonstrates how attention to the politics of representation through pluralistic approaches to power can help expand the repertoire of possibilities for advancing global environmental governance.