| dc.description.abstract | Governance that strengthens social justice is both a moral imperative and a practical strategy for effective, sustainable biodiversity conservation. Concerns of justice in conservation have largely been addressed as technical issues of distributional and participatory equity assessed at the site level. In systems of multilevel governance, though, concepts and practices implemented at the global level also construct and address conservation justice issues. Tensions among understandings of justice at different governance levels and their implications for conservation practice remain underexplored. In response to this gap, this thesis contributes a novel exploration of global and local perceptions of injustice in marine conservation. It characterises conceptual and practical approaches to just distribution, procedure, and recognition that extend dominant frameworks of conservation justice, and it explores the opportunities and risks posed by alignments and divergences among global and local perspectives. In doing so, the thesis advances a plural and multilevel approach to understanding injustices perceived in marine conservation governance systems and identifies opportunities for global governance actors to strengthen the alignment of their environmental justice and equity practices with local values.
The thesis takes a unique dual-level case study approach, examining perceptions of a dispersed community of global-level conservation practitioners together with those of a local coastal community in Tun Mustapha Park, a marine protected area in Sabah, Malaysia. In-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups explored participants’ own narrations of their notions of justice, their practices and behaviours, and their experiences of injustice. Their perceptions of individual and institutional responsibilities and remedies for injustices and associated challenges in the context of multilevel governance were also studied. Tun Mustapha Park exemplifies multifaceted marine governance change amidst interactions among culturally diverse stakeholders, providing an appropriate case in which to examine intricacies of justice concerns.
This thesis contributes to gaps in existing literature by illustrating how multidimensional injustices of distribution, procedure, and recognition are perceived and addressed not only by a local community confronting the implementation of a marine protected area, but also by practitioners involved in global-level conservation. Despite key areas of alignment, the global and local notions of justice explored here were characterised by largely different concerns. Global-level practitioners’ understandings of injustice were rooted in Western ideas of symbolic recognition, identity, and participatory parity, while notions at the local level centred on interpersonal and functional interactions creating subordination in a context of poverty. These notions and perceptions revealed that the three dimensions of justice— distribution, procedure, and recognition— related to one another through both synergies and trade-offs, undermining the assumption that dimensions of justice are always reciprocally supportive. In this case, approaches and practices central to global understandings of just conservation, such as formal recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples, also introduced justice risks in Tun Mustapha Park when they were perceived to exclude Bajau rightsholders. The findings presented here suggest that global-level operationalisation of conservation justice principles may not adequately address the lived experiences of diverse individuals and communities reliant on marine and coastal ecosystems and resources. Strategies recognising plural notions of justice may help minimise and anticipate risks and leverage opportunities for social justice in multilevel conservation governance. | en_GB |
