It’s official, I’m hosting this Focus Group at 5th International Marine Conservation Congress to be held from 24 to 29 June 2018 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. With a few of my colleagues, we are now looking for more contributions to this Focus Group. Join us at IMCC5!
5th International Marine Conservation Congress
Focus Group: Overcoming ethical challenges in marine conservation communication
Communications and Public Relations are getting rapidly increasing attention and allocation of resources within marine conservation organizations. But Mainstream Media (MSM) is struggling with either a huge lack of institutional capacity or editorial priority to cover related affairs as part of regular news agenda. In many cases, high resource needs to operate in remote marine areas and the novelty of the subjects to the newsroom are related to this scenario.
This dynamic is making way for ‘embedded’ journalism covering conservation efforts without clearly laid-out ethical safeguards on both sides. I’ve observed many such cases in Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore, and the USA, where MSM is being engaged to disseminate contents while being directly or indirectly guided and sponsored by the subjects, that is nature conservation and conservation groups, but this kind of communication and PR contents are not the replacement for objective journalism. This practice consequently deprives the nature conservation of objective reporting and critical coverage which are cornerstones of transparency, accountability, and public trust. A strong, responsive and dynamic ethical regime is imperative to address this challenge.
The Focus Group is designed to gather information about ethical challenges faced in marine conservation communication, identify key values and ethics, and prepare a draft for an ethical guideline. Before the conference, the host and other contributors will prepare a working-paper and distribute among the registered participants for their feedback and inputs.
So, whether you work with communications, marine conservation, media ethics or not, if you have experience and expertise to contribute to this Focus Group, please register, and do reach out to us.
Featured Photo: Perhentian Islands, Terengganu, Malaysia. by Anwar Hossain Chowdhury
As a journalist, when I started inquiring about ‘community-based conservation’ projects in 2010, I anticipated that we will be dealing with works which are empowering and enabling people into conservation, but that was not to be. We have found out that, in many cases, communities are less likely to be planning or implementing the conservation projects and more likely to be silent ‘poster child’ for the NGOs who are. Not only CBCs, to my experience back in Bangladesh, other approaches to conservation are also built on the gross dehumanization of people who are suffering the most from ecological degradation. And oftentimes, the ‘best’ leverage to trigger conservation interventions turns out to be very costly for the people who are the least negative actors in the system.
In this context, I am happy that I got the opportunity to attend the Pathways 2017 Conference in Colorado last year. It was very positive to listen to the first-hand account of professionals from many countries that, things are changing in many places. Most particularly, considering ‘human dimensions of wildlife conservation’ is being gradually popular among managers, slowly, but it’s happening.
‘What an awful fireplace’, a friend commented after seeing this photo on my Facebook wall. Except fireplaces decorated with animal trophies like this at YMCA of the Rockies Estes Park Center (located between Rocky Mountain National Park and the town of Estes Park), the Pathways 2017 Conference venue was a very quiet and scenic place. I was not surprised to see herd of Elks outside my window in the morning. ‘Ample opportunities to see wildlife’ is well advertised on YMCA’s website. Elks in flocks still frequent the 860-acre mountain resort where ‘wholesome Christian environment’ ensure that they are not being disturbed.
More than three hundred professionals involved in social science aspects of fisheries and wildlife management took part in the conference from September 17 through 20, 2017; mostly academics, and there were other scientists, NGO professionals, and students. Partnered with The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the conference theme was; ‘Futures: Integrating Human Dimensions into Fish and Wildlife Management.’ With a poster session, a number of panels and workshops, and at least 142 (not official count) contributions as oral presentations, it was very tightly scheduled.
Organized by the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at the Colorado State University, to my knowledge, it is THE largest knowledge forum to know about HWC works and meet the related people. Pathways is also a training platform focused on ‘increasing professionalism and effectiveness’ in the human dimensions of fisheries and wildlife management.
The wild mountain elks on the campus worked as ‘energizer’ during the breaks throughout the conference. And, seasonal warning signs of ‘bear activity’ brought hope to some participants, though the conference ended without any reported encounter. I remember a conversation during an Elk-watch. One of my colleagues exclaimed that ‘now that’s something that we call human-wildlife conflict!’ I added that, how about ‘human encroachment into wildlife habitat?’ The reply was intriguing; ‘I don’t think so. Maybe something worse could have happened if we were not here.’ Now, that’s something. What could have been happened if ‘humans were not the dominant species.’
It’s not my purpose here to inventory all the sessions and presentations I attended, but just a few notes are in order. And, of course, nothing preoccupies me during looking at a conservation intervention as much as the stake of the community who is being affected or expected to participate. So, I was mostly focused on that type of presentations and sessions.
Getting mainstream: Research related to human dimensions of wildlife conservation can be traced back to as early as the 1930s in North America (Stevens & Organ., 2017). But still, in the particular case presented by Stevens and Organ, the funding ratio for HWC research has not significantly increased. But interestingly, diversity of HWC research projects has been increased involving diverse stakeholder communities, and ‘society began to demand greater input into decision-making regarding wildlife and fisheries management’.
At 8000 feet, the temperature was fluctuating between 2 and 8-degree Celsius. The sudden change in altitude and temperature was little difficult for me. But after our presentation (Self-funded Model for Community-led In-situ Conservation of Sea Turtles), one day I went for a hike to more higher altitude into the national park on a 7-mile out-and-back trail. I was alone, and throughout the hike, while I was, of course, enjoying the well-conserved landscape I could not stop thinking about the indigenous people who were massacred and almost wiped out from this region. The massacres continued, even in many cases ‘accelerated’ after the independence from Britain. Probably later in November last year, I came across a news story on the Denver Post that, ‘Rocky Mountain National Park is going back to its roots, expanding its representation of Native Americans.’ Now, it should make us hopeful of the future.
Another thing I would like to note that, at least half the presentations I have attended was about working with something ‘first of its kind’ or ‘one of the first’. Social Suitability Index (SSI) for predator conservation that ‘measures the cultural context for conservation in a region’ (Kraftee et al., 2017), for instance. Given the history of big cat conservation, one can think that this could have been done long ago if there were enough attention and resources. And, that is a possibility if it is mainstreamed into conservation narrative. I remember, President and CEO of Association of Zoos and Aquarium, Dan Asher’s main argument during his keynote, that is, ‘there are no human dimensions of conservation, conservation is all about humans.’ It is an very effective rhetoric to show the way forward; we need HWC to be mainstreamed into conservation.
The challenge to transform ‘human dimensions’ into the ‘new normal’ of conservation: And, how do we do that? There are many critical opinions out there. And, with my little experience as a practitioner, it does not seem like a disciplinary case. For instance, mainstreaming social sciences (Bennett et al., 2017) in conservation will not do the job as such. Of course, it might help HWC to be broadly accepted; we will be seeing more works of this kind. But I can’t see that will necessarily transform HWC into the new normal of conservation. To me, the challenge is, whether HWC will enable us to intervene in core political and policy premises of traditional nature conservation narrative that still see ‘human dimensions’ as just another ‘tool’ to do the old job more effectively, that is, continuing the ambivalence towards ecological justice while celebrating only the presumed success of species-level conservation.
References:
Stevens, S., & Organ, J. (2017). The Evolution of Human Dimensions Research through the Lens of Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program Grants in the Northeast United States. Presentation, Pathways 2017 Conference, YMCA of the Rockies Estes Park Center, Colorado.
Kraftee, K., Larson, L., Powell, R., Allen, L., Hallo, J., & Jachowski, D. (2017). Assessing Cultural Context for Predator Conservation. Presentation, Pathways 2017 Conference, YMCA of the Rockies Estes Park Center, Colorado.
Bennett, N. J., Roth, R., Klain, S. C., Chan, K. M. A., Clark, D. A., Cullman, G., Epstein, G., Nelson, M. P., Stedman, R., Teel, T. L., Thomas, R. E. W., Wyborn, C., Curran, D., Greenberg, A., Sandlos, J. and Veríssimo, D. (2017), Mainstreaming the social sciences in conservation. Conservation Biology, 31: 56–66.
Gellately, Robert. 2006. The specter of genocide: mass murder in historical perspective. Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press.
In August, we participated in a discussion about ‘Being a Self Aware and Adaptive Leader’ organized under an Exchange Program at Georgetown University. In our group, more than half a dozen people from different countries discussed our experience and opinion about leading teams under different circumstances in culturally diverse spaces. Facilitated by the famous Deidre Combs of Combs and Company, we were given Daniel Goleman’s six styles of leadership (Goleman, 2000) as a reference. Here’s a PDF file summarizing Goleman’s classification.
I asked the fellows about which leadership styles they have found as best suitable for environmental organizations. The responses were diverse, but there was a consensus that each type serves different purposes in different circumstances. This means, according to my fellow community leaders, no single style is adequate for an organization. Having said that, one of our fellow Firuza Gulayozova, prioritized about ‘affiliative’ leadership style in environmental conservation.
Based on her experience in Tajikistan, she thinks adopting an ‘affiliative’ leadership style for organizations engaged in environmental conservation is very necessary. This observation intrigued me, and we talked about it later again, on another occasion. So, I thought before I forget, I should write it down.
Personally, until very recently, I didn’t think of any particular leadership style. I have led a few collective endeavors in mass communication, civil and human rights, and conservation, with very few successes and several terrible disasters. Looking back at those times now, I see I was always relying on others to lead together. I still am, leading like a diver, slow and steady, and always looking out for each other. Because for me, more than to achieve some goals, the important thing is working with people we love; works which we are passionate about.
Leading like a diver, slow and steady, and always looking out for each other.
I am still not convinced that we can effectively identify exclusive leadership features to attribute them to a particular style or category. But, of course, for the sake of communication, we can’t avoid classifications and terms like these categories of type. So, the necessity of discussion on prioritizing the ‘affiliative’ leadership style in conservation organizations resonated with me to some extent.
Firuza’s works in Conflict Resolution. She is ‘an expert in youth psychology and has developed skills in listening to the problems of young people and helping them find solutions.’
For any organization, Firuza said, everyone must have the scope to bring many ideas into the process; affiliative leadership is a powerful tool to create such an institutional environment. She thinks that the affiliative style is best for ‘supporting the team morally and making them feel valuable and practical. She thinks the job of conservation groups is not easy because the main task is working with people, not otherwise. The team members in such organizations need the highest degree of mutual patience and support. And the affiliative style of leadership serves this purpose very well under any circumstances.
I get it in the sense that, ‘conservation is about people’ approach needs to be first mainstreamed through the institutional process of conservation organizations. And, the leadership traits which we identify as ‘affiliative’ are based on the ‘people come first’ mantra and recognizes that empathy, building relationships, and communication are critical emotional intelligence competencies. Maybe these are the things we need to prioritize to revive our conservation organizations, which are badly affected by failing bureaucracy (‘commanding’ style?).
Reference
Goleman, D. (2000, March-April). Emotional Intelligence: Leadership That Gets Results. Harvard Business Review, pp. 82-83.
The more I attended those meetings, the more I got this feeling of time travel into the past. As if I am sitting among a group of colonists who are making plans to set up a new reserve in an occupied country. Enclosures; in the countryside, ‘‘protected’’ from access by the colonized people; the settlers will enjoy the practical and intrinsic values of the ‘‘nature’’. The natives will be living on the edge to serve the whites.
The problem with this feeling is that I am not recounting memories from past centuries (I am not that old, you know); those meetings happened between 2013 and 2016. And, there were very few white people attending those meetings. Those meetings were not taking place in India under East India Company’s brutal rule or in colonized Zimbabwe; those meetings were held in present-day Bangladesh. And most importantly, no one talked about the violent business of colonization, cleansing, slavery, or dislocation of native communities in an old or new form neither.
Now, let me use the vocabulary of a good-hearted, politically correct liberal naturalist; those meetings were about nature ‘‘conservation’’, where conservationists were discussing ‘‘spatial management’’ or ‘‘protected area’’, and so on. You have experts, practitioners, government officials, local representatives of international NGOs among these conservationists. And they were discussing strategies, management plans for ‘‘protected areas’’, to create ‘‘alternative livelihoods’’ for the ‘‘local communities’’.
Probably, you can make a guess, this type of meeting are generally workshops, consultations, seminars, conferences, and so on. These were mainly organized by INGOs, NGOs, UN agencies, and universities. Unfortunately, I have found myself among the organizers sometimes. It’s been almost one year since I am not attending any such meetings. But all these thoughts recently came back to me while I was talking to one of our colleagues; we were on a very long-distance call about something else, but he was seemingly uncomfortable about a recent discussion in Dhaka that he was a part of.
It was a discussion about the conservation of Ilish. One of the talking points was that riverine communities engaged in wild Hilsa fisheries are ignorant people, ‘‘beyond amending’’. We should consider pulling them out of subsistence and artisanal fishery and re-employ them in export-oriented ready-made garment factories.
”The question is if the best leverage for a conservation intervention is harmful to the people who provide the least negative trend in the system, then is the leverage well-thought?”
It is not just something being discussed here and there by some groups; it is happening. Rather than addressing significant stressors in social-ecological systems, conservation projects are going after the most vulnerable communities. Because simply it is ‘doable’ to mislead about the ‘indicator’ of success. For instance, when hundreds of mega-trawlers are dredging without Turtle Excluder Devices in a fishery, a conservation project can just declare victory by forcing out some subsistence and artisanal fishing families from the coastal waters to urban slums and name it as ‘alternative income generation.’
Suppose you do not have the historical experience as formerly colonized people, the experience of being dehumanized in this way. In that case, you will find it very difficult to understand why these discussions are reminiscent of the brutal colonial era. In 21st-century, nature conservation is still rationalizing and justifying violence on people who do not contribute to the global ecological and climate crisis.
So, while protecting or conserving nature always sounds unquestionably innocent when we live in our liberal bubbles, it is not that rosy for the people who are suffering most from ecological degradation without contributing much in the process of degradation. Again they become the victim of nature conservation efforts. When it comes to ‘conservation’ efforts by a specific government or inter-governmental agencies or international or national NGOs, things are not very black and white for the people living on the edge.
Is the leverage well-thought if the ‘best’ leverage for a conservation intervention is harmful to the people who provide the minor negative trend in the system? Was it chosen because it was deemed as the best possible leverage to start creating a positive trend in the system? Or was it just hand-picked based on the ease-ness of delivering the project? If you are a conservation partner of a government in the global south, in countries where political participation is often restricted, you know it better; there’s no other easy thing to do than motivate such a government to go after the marginalized communities.
But we can’t allow it to be continued. Because in this time when the unsustainable global economy is at its peak with all the consequences in the forms of global warming and extinction threat and so on, we can’t afford any more false hope in conservation.
If any ‘conservation’ efforts exclude the ‘nature’ from the social system, if they consider nature as ‘resources,’ if they deny the indigenous relationship, knowledge, and practices of communities, if they think of communities as ‘means’ to achieve ‘conservation’ ends, we should call those efforts out, those projects are not conservation, something else.
Conservationists should certainly stop excluding nature from societal spheres. In this way, we will see that we are not the messiah saving the ‘pure’ nature from the ‘people.’ We need to be conscious of this savior complex and avoid it.
And, when working with the communities to empower them against internal and external stressors within the social-ecological system, we should certainly stop stereotyping about communities because, as a people, no assembly is a homogeneous group. Individuals in society need to be recognized for their unique vulnerabilities as resilience.
Conservation needs to empower people who are the worst victims of ecological degradation; in countries like Bangladesh, where political participation is minimal, that is a tricky thing to do, and the job of conservation is to start addressing it no matter how much challenging it is. Of course, there are sectoral limitations. We can’t just start talking partisan politics. We should not. But working with communities for ecological justice is an excellent way to start. It will help flourish clusters of locally-led conservation efforts.
The development agencies that fund conservation efforts need to understand it. The main interests should be mitigating the most significant global ecological crisis in human history, not aggravating it.
[ I am a Community Solutions Program fellow. Hosted by the NOAA’s Georgia Sea Grant College Program and based at the Athens and Skidaway Island campuses of the University of Georgia’s Marine Extension Service. The practicum part of my fellowship has ended this week with an End of Program workshop held at a hotel in Washington, D.C. Following is the script of my EOP speech which I shared with international fellows. Here, it’s slightly edited for clarity. ]
We, underwater divers, sometimes joke about ourselves; that is, diving is a lazy person’s adventure. Because, in the depth of the sea, the slow and steady you swim, the better you navigate. For me, it’s true about life on the land also. Slow and relying on others to lead together. It’s all about doing things we love with the people we love.
Work photos from my CSP practicum; public program development and implementation.
And, it’s been quite a few months like that, as we are on this fellowship; to me, it feels like the first workshop here in DC, the first time we’ve met DD was just days ago. For me, the last few months were very peaceful; working with wonderful colleagues was almost like a drift-dive with sea turtles. It feels like time is flying by.
Dear fellows and guests! My thematic focus is ‘Environmental Issues,’ and my leadership journey is about PEOPLE. Back in Bangladesh, it started with me and a few of our friends’ commitment to the people living in the northeastern Indian Ocean region, one of the most climate-vulnerable communities in the world.
Work photos from my CSP practicum; covering and communicating citizen-science based conservation program.
As for our teams in Bangladesh, the strength is our shared life experience as a people facing an unprecedented loss of social resilience and ecosystem services. Our trust in people’s power led us to build a network of conservation movements. Throughout the networks, we always prioritize knowledge collaboration and learning-sharing. It’s one of our core approaches.
Also, these conservation groups are unconventional because it’s not about animal biology; we have people from all of the wakes of life, professionals from all disciplines collaborating for mainstream conservation into policies and practices.
Work photos from my CSP practicum; my base for the practicum was this Shellfish Lab of UGA MAREX on the campus of Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Georgia.
What drives us is the commitment to institutionalize community action to build locally-led efforts for conservation. We have had a few successes. To proceed, we have a lot to do with very unjust Natural Resources Management Regimes and approaches worldwide.
The state of my practicum, Georgia, faces very similar challenges. To me, last few months, it never felt like a foreign country. As a Scholar-in-Residence with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Grant Program based at the University of Georgia, one of my projects was to prepare a coastal public education program that will diversify the participants. During the planning phase, as part of the conversations with local families in the coastal city of Savannah, many people said to me that environmentalism is for affluent people.
Work photos from my CSP practicum; helping to organize and covering public programs for Georgia Sea Grant.
These lower and middle-income families don’t have a recreational fishing license or a villa on the beach. But they do suffer the most from the changing climate and increasing disasters. Many of them asked me, what’s in conservation for their children? They will move to inner cities anyway, looking for jobs. As a child born and raised in coastal Bangladesh during the decline of the coastal economy dependent on a healthy Ocean, their experience is very familiar to me. During the conversation with these families, one aspect of my talking points was, this feeling of being left out can be a starting point to take part, to prepare our young ones as the environmental stewards, to take over the policy process at the top. At a point during such a conversation in Skidaway Island, one of the mothers approached me and said, ‘I want you to be the mentor for my son, no matter wherever you stay.’
Work photos from my CSP practicum; met and connected with a number of local conservation groups in Georgia and other states of the U.S. This photo is from Tybee Island, of a rescued Sea Turtle release in the Atlantic by a local conservation group.
Her son, Scott the Junior, is an excellent artist at his age, and he told me he wants to be a Marine Biologist. We agreed to be a mentor and mentee. Last few months, there were a lot of moments like this. It was a blissful time for me. In this way, my life and leadership were always about people and will continue to be like that.
For now, with my host organization, we are planning to initiate a permanent conservation capacity-building program for early career professionals in five Bay of Bengal countries. It will be precisely a transboundary, collaborative learning for community action.
Dear fellows! To share is the most effective way to evaluate our works and develop. So, no matter what thematic area you are focused on, no matter which regions you are from, let’s share all of our experiences about the people we work with and work for. As a communicator, it will be my pleasure to collaborate with you based on shared experiences.
Many thanks for your attention, and remember that we can do the community works better if we do the learning-sharing better.
Arju 
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