Video-mediated dialogue for promoting equity in protected area conservation

Abstract

Improving equity in the context of protected areas conservation cannot be achieved in situations where people have different capabilities to participate. Participatory video has the potential to uncover hidden perspectives and worldviews and to build trustworthy, transparent and accountable relationships between marginalized communities and external agencies. We present findings from video-mediated dialogues between Indigenous peoples and decision makers involved in the management of three protected areas in Guyana. Participatory films created by Indigenous researchers in their communities were screened and discussed with protected area managers. We recorded their responses and presented them back to the communities. We show how the video-mediated process provided a rich and contextualized understanding of equity issues. It enabled recognition and respect by protected area managers for Indigenous lived experiences and the contribution of their values and knowledge. For Indigenous peoples, the participatory video process built confidence and critical reflection on their own activities and responsibilities whilst allowing them to challenge decision makers on issues of transparency, communication and accountability. We show that equity is an evolving process and that different protected areas with their differing histories and relationships with Indigenous communities produce distinct outcomes over time. Thus, promoting equity in protected areas and conservation must be a long-term process, enabling participation and producing the conditions for regular, transparent and honest communications. Standardized indicators of protected areas equity could be useful for reporting on international targets, but video-mediated dialogue can facilitate deeper understanding, greater representation and a recognition of rights.

Participatory video as a tool for co-management in coastal communities: a case study from Madagascar

“…These challenges include lack of evidence concerning the social (Cinner et al, 2012) and ecological conditions (Granek and Brown, 2005;Fidler et al, 2021), the integration of local ecological knowledge in decision-making (Moller et al, 2004;Ullah et al, 2023), issues related to trust between local stakeholders and external organizations (Fargier et al, 2014), difficulty in fostering local participation and sense of ownership (Carr and Heyman, 2012) and the inability to influence external broad-scale forces which exert direct or indirect pressure on the marine ecosystem (Granek and Brown, 2005;Long et al, 2019;Gardner et al, 2020). From the standpoint of local stakeholders, management partners and/or other collaborators, participatory video could provide a relatively low-cost and accessible means to help address these challenges, while directly engaging local community members (Bali and Kofinas, 2014;Bartindale et al, 2019;Mistry et al, 2021).…”

Decolonising Fire Science by Reexamining Fire Management across Contested Landscapes: A Workshop Approach

“…In recognition of the challenges outlined in the previous section, Leverhulme Wildfires initiated a Decolonising Fire Science workshop series in April 2022. This series explored opportunities for participatory research approaches that foreground relationality and experience in the construction of scientific understandings of fire-use communities and landscapes [42,43]. Central to this approach were questions of power, justice, legitimacy, and "otherness", such that we sought to understand how our own situational self-identity impacts our interpretation of the "other"-the research participants-identifying how patterns of power and privilege might shape our inquiries in different contexts [44,45].…”

“…Critiques of the "participation" paradigm include the ways in which attempts to retrieve the voice of "the other" can inscribe false dichotomies between local or Indigenous knowledge versus scientific or Western knowledge [57][58][59]. Similarly, it was acknowledged how participatory processes are imbued with power relations between researchers and participants and between participants [43,60,61]. Other barriers to achieving decolonisation in research include funding, time, institutional and academic requirements, and the nature and scale of the research project.…”

Indigenous Economies for Post-Covid Development

“…We have been working with Indigenous communities through participatory video for many years (e.g. Mistry et al, 2014Mistry et al, , 2015Mistry et al, , 2022, and as part of the larger Darwin Initiative project, had already developed a network of community peer researchers in several villages in the North Rupununi.…”