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.
IJC#6: Social-ecological fit in Wisconsin lakes with Dane Whittaker
Insight Episode #39: Kimberley Peters on the changing governance of the oceans
099: The politics of environmental access and risk with Jesse Ribot
Science and Practice #3 Stories of a chronicler with Arati Kumar Rao
Science and Practice #2: Applying behavior science for conservation with Erik Thulin
Insight Episode #38: Emily Boyd on the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary training and sustainability science
098: A biography of Water with Giulio Boccaletti
097: People, Science and Cross-Disciplinary Research in Conservation with Ghazala Shahabuddin
096: Institutional diversity and the evolution of water markets with Dustin Garrick
095: Agrarian reforms and the property rights gap with Mike Albertus
Insight Episode #37: Henrik Österblom on unsustainable science
Science and Practice #1: Conservation and social science with Nathan Bennett
Insight Episode #36: Brent Loken on how food production and animal conservation are related
094: Protected areas with Dan Brockington
093: Complexity and the Subaks of Bali with Steve Lansing
Insight Episode #35: Jessica Gephart on seafood trade discrepancies
092: Sustainable development with Kaitlin Cordes
091: Marine conservation in Haiti with Jean Wiener
IJC#5: Guiding would-be institutional crafters with Jim Sinner
Insight #34: Beatriz Dos Santos Dias on modeling and historical ecology
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