Distant Interactions, Power, and Environmental Justice in Protected Area Governance: A Telecoupling Perspective

Abstract

Equity has become a major concern in efforts to conserve nature. However, in the Global South, inequitable social impacts of conservation usually prevail. We investigate barriers to equitable governance of four protected areas through an innovative approach linking the tri-dimensional framing of environmental justice with the notion of telecoupling. We conceptualize the creation, support, and implementation of protected areas as telecoupling processes that involve flows, actors, and action situations, and assess them based on a set of indicators of procedural justice, distributive justice, and recognition. We perform the analysis for parallel or competing telecoupling processes that affect the areas and we then investigate the scope and reach of resistance actions to attain more equitable outcomes. Identified barriers include dependence of the PAs on transnational financial flows, presence of competing extractive demands, negative narratives on local practices, wilderness and Malthusian framings, authoritarian rule, narrow development options, and socio-cultural discrimination. These combined barriers create multiple forms of exclusion. Resistance actions are likely to succeed when actors can mobilize alliances and resources across distance. We conclude that justice framings can make power relationships in telecouplings more visible, and that considering distant interactions can elucidate causes of (in)equity in conservation.

A Synthesis of Opportunities for Applying the Telecoupling Framework to Marine Protected Areas

“…Most of the research on telecoupling to date has been conducted in terrestrial environments. Some studies have been done involving terrestrial protected areas, which have shown the extent to which even remote terrestrial reserves are connected and impacted in diverse ways by distant systems [84][85][86][87]. Effects of telecoupling on terrestrial protected areas are varied, including positive effects seen in the case of outside federal aid rescuing a protected area recovering from a natural disaster [84] and negative effects such as in the case of the rights of indigenous groups in protected areas made more vulnerable via extractive demands from transnational trade flows [85].…”

“…Some studies have been done involving terrestrial protected areas, which have shown the extent to which even remote terrestrial reserves are connected and impacted in diverse ways by distant systems [84][85][86][87]. Effects of telecoupling on terrestrial protected areas are varied, including positive effects seen in the case of outside federal aid rescuing a protected area recovering from a natural disaster [84] and negative effects such as in the case of the rights of indigenous groups in protected areas made more vulnerable via extractive demands from transnational trade flows [85]. Some valuable telecoupling work has been done in marine environments on understanding distal causes and effects of seabird migration [71], the Peruvian fishery industry [88], and mapping 'extra-local' ecosystem services in the marine context [24].…”

The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

“…However, the telecoupling framework does not make explicit the wider implications of distant interactions to society and to the environment in terms of power, control and unequal outcomes. For this reason, several researchers on telecoupling have proposed a more heuristic telecoupling approach that includes institutions, actor networks and governance processes to make power relationships in decision-making across distances more explicit (Friis et al 2015;Eakin et al 2017, Oberlack et al 2018. In this contribution, we propose to connect the concept of telecoupling with a geopolitical approach, which pays attention to unfolding power relationships within conservation spaces and how these relations are forged through distant interactions.…”

Capabilities Under Telecoupling: Human Well-Being Between Cash Crops and Protected Areas in North-Eastern Madagascar

“…In order to safeguard forest ecosystems, a key landscape planning tool is the establishment of protected areas (PAs) (Thomas and Gillingham, 2015;Melillo et al, 2016). Some scholars consider PAs as "telecoupled territories" in themselves, chiefly because of the large role played by international actors in their establishment and management, and the dependence of PAs on external financial flows (Boillat et al, 2018). The area of land under legal protection regimes has been increasing for decades (Watson et al, 2014) and calls to vastly expand it are emerging (Dinerstein et al, 2019).…”