Since the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, counting and mapping have come to dominate international debates around biodiversity protection. With the emergence of the Ecosystem Services concept, these counting and mapping efforts are increasingly imbued with an economic logic that argues that to save biodiversity, its goods and services must be given monetary value. This article offers a critical engagement with the Ecosystem Services discourse and the way it translates the diversity of nature into a single measure-a "currency"-to be included in systems of exchange. We argue that this conception of biodiversity is too narrow and potentially detrimental because it reduces biodiversity to a series of quantifiable fragmented parts that become liable to counting, mapping, and utilitarian use, and because it reduces social-natural relations to market transactions. Subsequently, we outline possibilities for conceiving and living with biodiversity that go beyond relations of counting, mapping, and commodification. It is important that biodiversity knowledge organizations, such as the recently sanctioned Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), take these into account. Conserving a diversity of life requires acknowledging a diversity of values, knowledge and framings of biodiversity, and fostering a diversity of social-natural relations.

Introductioǹ`U nlike the laboratories of physics or chemistry, the natural world appears to belong to everybody. At least in principle, anyone with normal capacities is supposed to be able to contribute to the advancement of natural history. Moreover since the field of investigation extends all over the world, professional naturalists have long been aware that they need the help of well-disposed volunteers to collect rocks and fossils, report on bird migrations, and similar phenomena. Despite öor perhaps because oföthis need, cooperation between these groups generated increasing tensions. These are epitomized by the semantic switch öat least in the English languageöin the term`amateur' toward the end of the nineteenth century. The old positive meaning of`connoisseur' has gradually been overthrown by the pejorative sense of`dilettante' emphasising a lack of seriousness and reliability.'' Drouin and Bensaude-Vincent (1996, pages 417^418) In this paper we look at a series of relationships that have developed and are being reforged in efforts to know the natural world. This is happening in a contemporary policy climate where the`participation' of amateur naturalists is seen as key to`knowing nature'. The study we report in this paper involves locating the main participants within such relationships: namely, nature, amateur naturalists, and professional biologists and conservationists. As with most networks, the global and the local, the historical and contemporary, dimensions are relational and mutually constitutive: boundaries between these categories are historically and culturally shaped, thus tending towards malleable rather than static structures. Although we are at pains in this paper to highlight continuities with past networks, what we describe is in many senses an observably new network-in-the-making, designed by professional conservationists to bring amateur naturalists into a closer relationship with a specific genre of conservation Abstract. In this paper we document current research into new forms of public engagement presently taking place in UK biodiversity policy. This involves locating the main participants in such patterns of engagement; namely nature, amateur naturalists, and professional biologists and conservationists. Two interwoven and mutually interdependent perspectives or`imaginaries'öthe`cartographic' and thè ethnographic'öare presented in the paper to explore the shaping and interpretation of such new forms of engagement. However, in this context the interest lies in the ways in which either perspective is foregrounded or backgrounded by the different parties involved. The described shifts and movements of a range of actors and processes being studied demonstrate the fluidity and instability of networks of`knowing nature well', whose stability is often assumed. The tracing of two constantsö expertise and exchangeöwithin networks inhabited by nature and by amateur and professional naturalists allows for an exploration of ways in which social/natural inclusions and exclusions occur in new...

This paper documents research taking place in the midst of a series of shifts in biodiversity policy in the UK. It examines recent attempts to enrol volunteer naturalists and lay citizens into biodiversity action planning, suggesting that such attempts can be seen as a nascent form of environmental citizenship, which is based on the exchange of knowledge of nature among the different communities involved (policy makers, volunteer naturalists and lay citizens). By focusing on a range of knowledge practices, the paper explores the selective appropriation of some ways of knowing over others. It documents ways in which some actors involved are beginning to reflect on what it might mean for biodiversity policy to accommodate each others' knowledge and practices. The paper suggests that an increased sensitivity to the range of practices and knowledge embodied within these different domains may result in a redefinition and expansion of the category of citizen, and may in turn have implications for the way in which 'biodiversity' comes to be defined.

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