Abstract Summary
Sahotra Sarkar (University of Texas, Austin) - Besides ecology, biodiversity conservation is guided by formal decision theory and ethical analysis. This paper reports on a case where this theoretical framework was translated into practice. This experience has demonstrated the mutual value for interaction between philosophical theory and practical policy, but it has also led to a cautionary strategic attitude about developing collaborative partnerships with actors from outside academia. In 2008 our laboratory was asked to join a collaborative effort to develop a sustainable biodiversity conservation plan for the Merauke region of Papua Province (Indonesian New Guinea) controlled by the Medco corporation. The landscape is a tropical savanna in which Medco had to balance its own interest in pulp production and biodiversity conservation (which it claimed to endorse) with the interests of nineteen indigenous communities that were traditional (and often competing) users of this habitat. The goal was to produce a spatial management plan for the Medco concession. The selection of priority areas for biodiversity representation and persistence has long been recognized as falling within the domain of decision analysis, that part of formal epistemology that deals with the rationality of choice and action (see Possingham et al. 1983). By the 1990s conservation biologists had come to recognize that the optimal representation of biodiversity was only part of the problem that had to be solved for satisfactory habitat management (Sarkar 2012). Effective management required trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and other legitimate uses of habitats including human habitation, production (e.g., agriculture), and resource extraction. The project involved elicitation of preferences and viewpoint accommodation from the distinctive local communities that had legitimate stakes in the region: these included appropriating “biodiversity” to local priorities for the maintenance of natural variety, preserving plant assemblages and other ecological communities perceived to be of cultural importance, and developing methodologies of communal preference elicitation. The decision support methodology produced a portfolio of potential solutions, that is, nominal conservation plans, that were deemed as feasible by all stakeholders. These results were transmitted to Medco by Conservation International in 2012 and published recently (Sarkar et al. 2017). However, a conservation plan is yet to be implemented. Though our laboratory results had the support of the communities, the conflicts that have since emerged between them and Medco have remained murky. For philosophical theory, the exercise resulted in the development of new methodologies for performing decision analysis and in particular protocols for the elicitation of robust preferences. The exercise has also led to a reassessment of how translation of abstract theory into action-oriented implementation must involve negotiation of power relations between stakeholders even by external decision support providers—my laboratory in this case—that are not stakeholders with a direct material interest in the results. More direct contact between the local communities and us, unmediated by Conservation International and Medco, is likely to have produced results that would have greater impact through at least partial implementation.
