PhD defence: Joel Persson

Joel Persson defends his thesis,

Governing from a distance
Disentangling the global-local interconnections shaping transnational conservation

Supervisors:
Professor Ole Mertz, IGN
Professor Jonas Østergaard Nielsen, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Assessment Committee
Senior Research Scientist Andreas Heinimann, Universität Bern – Switzerland
Associate Professor Wolfram Dressler, University of Melbourne – Australia
Associate Professor Laura Vang Rasmussen (chair), IGN

Summary:
The scale of biodiversity loss is unique in our globalised world, and continues to accelerate despite continued political commitments and billions of dollars spent annually on conserving nature. A long history of collaborations on nature and biodiversity conservation has made transnational conservation a global phenomenon. While interventions often target specific places, such as protected areas, global policy discourses on conservation are often disconnected from the local realities where policy interventions are implemented. We need better tools to understand the interconnections, discursive practices, and networked interactions involved in transnational biodiversity conservation. In this thesis, I interrogate the site-based and flow-based dimensions of transnational conservation, with a focus on protected area governance in Laos. In four papers, I analyse how transnational conservation networks affect environmental governance. In the first paper, I develop an analytical tool for analysing the discursive-institutional dynamics of transnational biodiversity conservation. In the second paper, I examine the international networked interactions through which transnational conservation actions emerge and manifest in changes in policy and practice. Focusing on Laos in the third paper, I analyse how transnational biodiversity conservation policies influence local environmental governance in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park. Finally, in the fourth paper, I qualify the inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms that conservation interventions produce and measure their implications for local livelihoods and land-use practices. The thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the global-local interconnections involved in transnational conservation through a methodologically innovative approach.

A digital version of the PhD thesis can be obtained from the PhD secretary Mikala Heckscher at mikala@ign.ku.dk