In this episode, Michael speaks with Sarah Milne, a senior lecturer at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University about her recent book, “Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation”.
In the book, Sarah recounts her experience with a conservation policy implemented in the Cardamom mountains of Cambodia by a major international environmental NGO, Conservation International. This policy is called a Conservation Agreement, and it is a type of payment for ecosystem services, or PES, policy. These involve an external actor paying a local resource user as an individual or a group to incentivize them to provide important public goods, in this case forest conservation. Sarah describes how the new conservation agreement model developed within Conservation International and how it grew into a corporate product to be applied in a range of contexts. Sarah worked on the ground in Cambodia as this policy was implemented, and describes the challenges it met when the simplifying theory and requirements of the model confronted political and ecological complexity in the field. An important point that Sarah makes is that we need to worry less about the promotion of a particular model and more about developing an “ethics of practice”.
Website: https://crawford.anu.edu.au/people/academic/sarah-milne
References:
Milne, S. 2022. Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation. University of Arizona Press.
Insight #12: Jeremy Caradonna on the history of sustainability thinking
031: Food as a commons and changing food narratives in a post-COVID19 world with Jose Luis Vivero-Pol
Insight #11: Mark Lubell on the ecology of games and polycentricity
Insight #10: Krister Andersson on reframing deforestation
030: The politics of geoengineering and climate change with Ina Möller
029: Network analysis and qualitative data sharing with Steven Alexander
Insight #9: Juan Camilo Cárdenas on teaching with games
028: Governing renewable natural resources and institutional analysis with Fiona Nunan
027: Social-ecological modeling, family life, and heading back to Spain with Irene Perez Ibarra
026: Comparative social-ecological fisheries research with Emily Darling and Georgina Gurney
025: Case study databases in commons and social-ecological systems research -- an IASC webinar
Insight #8 - María José Barragán on Galapagos multi-stakeholder agenda setting
Insight #7: Neal Haddaway on how to do a systematic literature review
024: Craft beer and transdisciplinarity with Barry Ness
Insight #6: Academic working culture
023: Policy engaged research, collective action, and the ecology of games with Mark Lubell
Insight #5: The challenge of frameworks
022: Sustainable food systems with Liz Carlisle
Insight #4: Harini Nagendra on structural biases
021: Linking Stoicism and sustainability with Kai Whiting
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Poetry of Science
Behavioral Grooves Podcast
Hidden Brain
Proxy with Yowei Shaw
The Science of Happiness