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Science ChroniclesSocial Scientists in Conservation: Who They Are & What They Can Do
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 9:29am
If there were no human beings, there would be no conservation problems. The increasingly intense and widespread conservation challenges that we face today are not naturally occurring, but the results of the scale and scope of human activities. That’s why the Conservancy is broadening its conservation efforts to include social scientific knowledge and resources. TNC is enlisting social scientists to help address the following questions and purposes:
- What type of conservation planning and strategies are relevant, beneficial and accepted by people?
- How does conservation impact people, and how can we do our work to contribute to the well-being of local communities?
- How are conservation benefits and their distribution perceived by stakeholders, so we can better understand who is benefiting from our conservation actions and in what ways?
- What motivates people to support a conservation project, and how might this help us design appropriate incentives for specific behaviors or outcomes?
- What are the attitudes and perceptions people have regarding specific conservation projects?
- How do environmental problems cause social problems and vice-versa?
- How might our work on social concerns and issues create opportunities for others to provide long-term leadership on environmental issues, relieving the Conservancy of that role?
- How might using a broader range of monitoring and evaluation tools and approaches guide our work in complex social arenas?
In this article, I would like to dispel some common assumptions about social sciences, outline how the work done by social scientists is relevant to TNC, and then relate how the capacity to create diverse teams of social scientists contributes to our prospects of effectively addressing the human dimensions of conservation.
Common Assumptions about Social Science
Would you ask a marine biologist to take a look at problems with bark beetles in western North America or a forest ecologist to address problems of mass coral bleaching? Would you have an oncologist give you a root canal or have a dentist fix your knee problem?
We all understand why it’s crucial to use the appropriate specialist to solve a particular question or problem. It’s no different for social scientists. For example, both resource economists and anthropologists are social scientists. But it’s a resource economist, not an anthropologist, who should do a cost-benefit analysis of an oyster restoration project; and an anthropologist, not an economist, who should do an ethnographic study of the relationship between Hawaiians and their aumakua (ancestral guardian spirits that may take possession of living creatures or inhibit visible forms) and how that relationship could support conservation of relevant species.
Unfortunately, assumptions often obscure facts when it comes to social science. Many people think of social science as encompassing any people-related work (e.g., work on economic development, education and governance) and that anyone working with people (e.g., community facilitators or survey data collectors) is a social scientist. As a result, social scientists are often expected to have the skills and knowledge required to address all human-related issues.
Many of us at the Conservancy fall into this trap. We often fail to differentiate among the sub-disciplines within social science and assume that every social scientist can do every kind of social scientific work. Social phenomena are complex; and the more highly educated and deeply experienced social scientists are, the more specialized they tend to become in both areas of study and methodologies. To assume that all social scientists are alike in terms of training and expertise is to set them up to fail — not to mention the projects they are assigned to help.
But the problem goes even deeper. While a single social scientist can only properly address a subset of issues, the social sciences as a whole can address a wide range of questions that bear directly on the Conservancy’s effectiveness, both at the project and the organizational levels. Without availing itself of this expertise, the Conservancy will not become the comprehensive conservation leader it can be.
Some Facts about Social Science
In fact, social science is a branch of science that involves the discovery and explanation of social realities through methodologically sound and scientifically accepted approaches. It is crucial to recognize that there are many disciplines within social science. We should really speak of social sciences in the plural. The primary goal of any social science is to generate knowledge about different aspects of human society, social relationships and human behaviors. Aspects examined in a study are myriad — ranging from the cultural to the political, historical, economic, physical and spatial, legal, psychological, educational or institutional.
For example, resource economics specializes in the analysis of how people make decisions about allocating scarce resources to the production of desired goods and services, and of how the resulting goods and services are distributed and contribute to human well-being (Kroeger, pers comm). Anthropology focuses on human origins and cultural development. Geography is the study of the earth, its features, and of the (spatial) distribution of life on the earth. While each of these social science disciplines contains at least one branch that studies the relationship between people and the natural environment, each examines that relationship through a different lens.
Because social phenomena can be quite complex, social scientists make use of a wide range of research methods — and they select which methods to use depending on the basis of the nature and type of research questions, the situation of the study sites, and the skills and resources available. Although surveys often come to mind, they are neither the only nor the main method of social science research. Social scientists use in-depth one-on-one and group interviews, systematic observation, and spatial tools. Some collect secondary data to develop models and run numerical analysis to predict or project results, while others rely on laboratory experiments for their data. Often a multi-strategy design is used to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches. In addition, not all good social science research is designed to test a hypothesis. As a matter of fact, many studies do not have a hypothesis, and their research questions are developed and shaped in the field to respond to the views and values of the research subjects.
How Can the Social Sciences Contribute to TNC?
Social scientists are well-suited to helping the Conservancy with the following:
- Understanding local needs, values, ecological knowledge and situations. Social scientists can help us develop criteria and identify social outcomes and strategies that both link to our conservation targets and are relevant to the people impacted by our work. At the same time, these scientists can help assess our potential for successful engagement with people. Social scientists might be the ones who can help determine how the Conservancy can realistically contribute to addressing human well-being.
- Adding a human dimension to conservation action planning and program/project design. This addition would help ensure that our conservation plans are relevant, beneficial and supported by the people who are closest to the nature we are protecting and who could make or break our efforts.
- Answering questions about how our work has impacted or may potentially impact people. Social scientists are adept at identifying and/or developing appropriate indicators, methods and tools for impact on people. They can also help to monitor and evaluate conservation project effectiveness — finding out what works, what does not, what should continue, and what needs change.
- Identifying and determining how to collaborate with partners who can help us better address human well-being without changing our organizational focus.
- Identifying pilot projects or programs and helping to plan and implement activities that serve as concrete examples of work that integrates human well-being and conservation.
Each social scientist can make a distinctive contribution to addressing these activities related to the human dimensions of conservation. For instance, anthropologists or cultural geographers can help us understand opportunities we might now be missing to work with cultural practices that promote conservation (and to identify and proactively address cultural practices that work against it). Social psychologists could help us see links among values, attitudes and behaviors related to conservation. Resource economists can increase our capacity to conduct valuation, cost-benefit or economic impact analyses. And political scientists can help us effectively take into account how governmental and inter-governmental policy and governance affect prospects for successful conservation.
Social Science Capacity at the Conservancy
Does this mean that the Conservancy has to have all types of social scientists? No. But it is important to realize that, because of the complexity of the human dimensions of conservation challenges, effectively investigating and addressing them requires a cognitively diverse team of social scientists. Moreover, it is important to recognize that there are sub-branches in various social science disciplines that study the relationships between people and nature, and that many of the scientists working in these areas have overlapping interests and understandings of social-ecological systems. While staffing decisions should be need- and strategy-driven, a critical mass of social scientists is crucial for the Conservancy to ensure that it is being maximally effective in achieving more cost-effective global solutions and minimizing reputational risks.
The point here is not just numbers. Having an effective critical mass of social scientific expertise involves balancing disciplinary breadth and individual interests that are relevant to specific TNC project areas. For example, although a team that includes a cultural anthropologist, a political ecologist, a resource economist and a social psychologist might offer a disciplinary spread matched to a given TNC project, it might be more important to ensure the involvement of social scientists with sub-disciplinary interests in gender or conflict resolution. The point is to recognize that different projects will require bringing together different sets of individual social scientists. No single social scientist or single social science team will able to address all human well-being issues. In fact, there is no generic “ideal team” of social scientists. As in putting together natural science teams, project needs are paramount.
Integrating social sciences into the “knowledge ecology” to which the Conservancy turns for conservation resources will not be a cure-all. But carefully and conscientiously accomplished, such integration will substantially and significantly expand and enhance TNC’s capacities to respond to global challenges — and ultimately create a planet on which people and nature can both flourish.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Timm Kroeger, Craig Leisher, Nina Hadley, Alison Greenberg and Jenny Brown, whose comments on earlier drafts of this paper substantially improved it.
Image: Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada. Image credit: D’Arcy Norman/Flickr
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