Seminar in Critical Development Studies: Dan Brockington

About the speaker

Dan Brockington is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I have been working on different aspects of conservation social science for some time, covering the social impacts of conservation policy, global overviews of eviction from protected areas, continental wide examinations of the work of conservation NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa, the politics of natural resource management and the work of media and celebrity in conservation and development. My current project explores Conservation Data Justice for which I was awarded an Advanced ERC in 2022. In other work I have studied academic publishing microfinance, development data, irrigation practices and long term livelihood change in East Africa. My books include Fortress Conservation, Nature Unbound (with Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe) Celebrity Advocacy and International Development , and (with Christine Noe) Prosperity in Rural Africa? I serve on the boards of the NGOs Micaia, and Dakshin. Outside of work I write children’s fiction and have recently completed a middle grade fictional trilogy (the Samti series) published by APE networks in Dar es Salaam. 

Abstract:

In December 2022 the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity agreed a series of measures that requires ‘effective conservation and management’ of 30% of the world’s lands, waters and oceans. Determining where this attention should be directed – the exercise of conservation prioritisation – preoccupies many of the world’s leading conservation scientists. Conservation prioritisation is data hungry. It requires numerous data layers depicting land cover and land cover change, eco-region maps, agricultural activity, human populations, wealth, species distribution, predictions of how all these will change as the climate warms and so on. In this presentation I outline a new way of looking at the challenges of prioritisation by considering the data justice issues that it presents. I outline first why we need to think about data justice, and how it differs from other established concepts like epistemic justice. I then discuss what forms of data are being used in some conservation planning exercises and how using a data justice lens can help us better to understand the challenges they pose. I suggest practical ways of responding to some of the ethical challenges that arise.
 

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2025-26 are Eve Devillers, Jessie Whittaker Mayall, Aaron Benanav, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.