A new paper is out, about the crucial role of critical social science in conservation. This initiative was led by Kate Massarella, who did a truly great job weaving together so many opinions and ideas in one paper for a great journal (Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability), and foregrounding the CON-VIVA project! The highlights and abstract of the paper:

Highlights

We interrogate conceptualisations of transformation in biodiversity conservation.

Many proposals do not consider power, politics, justice or alternative knowledge.

We thus highlight the key role of critical social science in transformative change.

The CONVIVA project politicises and pluralises biodiversity conservation debates.

CONVIVA also explores transformative alternatives to dominant conservation models.

Abstract

Multiple proposals for transforming biodiversity conservation have been put forward, yet critical exploration of how transformative change is conceptualised in this context is lacking. Drawing on transformations to sustainability scholarship, we review recent proposals for transformative change in biodiversity conservation, considering the suggested goals and means of transformation. We outline the crucial role for critical social scientific inquiry in transformative change by highlighting two core contributions. First, critical social science is an analytical device that politicises and pluralises debates and second, it can help facililitate the identification of transformative alternatives. We then show how such a critical social science approach is operationalised within the CONVIVA (Towards Convivial Conservation: Governing Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Anthropocene) project to pursue transformative change in biodiversity conservation.