Elegant conservation: reimagining protected area stewardship in the 21st century

Abstract

We present an approach to the conservation of protected areas that aligns cultural truths with scientific truths to increase community capacity for conservation. This alignment, which we call elegant conservation, asks protected area managers to reimagine how conservation can be inclusive of cultures and subcultures whose members value protected areas, but not in the same way. Reimagining how protected area managers approach conservation requires them to observe closely and holistically, with fresh eyes, human consciousness and behavior as well as relationships between people and between people and nature. Our approach connects the humanities, Western sciences, and other forms of knowledge, including Indigenous knowledge, in a manner that more sustainably builds social support for conservation. We first offer a heuristic of seven conditions that protected area managers can analyze when sizing up conservation issues and the people involved. We then propose a heuristic of five human tendencies-elements of human consciousness-that can help protected area managers and their partners organize constructive responses to any conservation issue. Our model of elegant conservation offers a pragmatic, holistic, inclusive alternative to top-down, reductive management approaches and is an outgrowth of modern American intellectual history, especially since the end of the Cold War, ca. 1989War, ca. -1990. Elegant conservation presents an opportunity to help people find common ground and move protected area management beyond its origins in settler colonialism at a time of national and planetary crisis.

Seeing beyond the frames we inherit: A challenge to tenacious conservation narratives

“…Natural and social scientists everywhere are struggling to understand how to proceed in the face of continued biodiversity loss and the injustices brought upon people living in and around conservation landscapes (Archer et al, 2022;Bobowski & Fiege, 2023; e.g. Rudd et al, 2021;Salomon et al, 2023;Trisos et al, 2021).…”

Collaborative care in environmental governance: restoring reciprocal relations and community self-determination

“…identities through the making of baskets, regalia, medicines, traditional foods, and ceremony(Hart-Fredeluces et al 2022, Oberholtzer Dent et al 2023.Because "care in power" is rooted in Indigenous sovereignty (e.g.,Whyte 2011, Simpson 2017, this concept reminds us that Indigenous Nations make resource management decisions "as an order of (Qeshm Island),Ghayoumi et al (2023) explore how governance regimes can uplift community decision making by understanding "the nature of communities, together with culture, rights, and economic interests." Writing as a park manager and scholar working in Alaska,Bobowski and Fiege (2023) discuss the challenges in resource management decision-making processes https://www.ecologyandsociety.…”

Making PES work for Vietnam : A multi-scale policy analysis of payments for forest environmental services

“…Third and perhaps most important, contrasting to neoliberal PES, it is suggested that studies on ecosystem services in developing countries like Vietnam should pay more attention to stewardship than ownership, not only because nature and marginalised communities are better protected by stewardship ( van Noordwijk et al, 2010;Julian Pratts, 2011;Solazzo et al, 2015;Bobowski & Fiege, 2023), but also because the stewardship dimension is well-suited within existing social-cultural and political norms that tend to take into account the values and interests of whole society in which PES can be more easily accepted and legitimized.…”