Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 73091, Riddarhyttan, Sweden.
Research Unit of Biodiversity (UO/CSIC/PA), Oviedo University, 33600, Mieres, Spain.
Conserv Biol. 2020 Aug;34(4):795-802. doi: 10.1111/cobi.13485. Epub 2020 May 14.
Conservation conflicts are gaining importance in contemporary conservation scholarship such that conservation may have entered a conflict hype. We attempted to uncover and deconstruct the normative assumptions behind such studies by raising several questions: what are conservation conflicts, what justifies the attention they receive, do conservation-conflict studies limit wildlife conservation, is scientific knowledge stacked against wildlife in conservation conflicts, do conservation-conflict studies adopt a specific view of democracy, can laws be used to force conservation outcomes, why is flexibility needed in managing conservation conflicts, can conservation conflicts be managed by promoting tolerance, and who needs to compromise in conservation conflicts? We suggest that many of the intellectual premises in the field may defang conservation and prevent it from truly addressing the current conservation crisis as it accelerates. By framing conservation conflicts as conflicts between people about wildlife or nature, the field insidiously transfers guilt, whereby human activities are no longer blamed for causing species decline and extinctions but conservation is instead blamed for causing social conflicts. When the focus is on mitigating social conflicts without limiting in any powerful way human activities damaging to nature, conservation-conflict studies risk keeping conservation within the limits of human activities, instead of keeping human activities within the limits of nature. For conservation to successfully stop the biodiversity crisis, we suggest the alternative goal of recognizing nature's right to existence to maintenance of ecological functions and evolutionary processes. Nature being a rights bearer or legal person would imply its needs must be explicitly taken into account in conflict adjudication. If, even in conservation, nature's interests come second to human interests, it may be no surprise that conservation cannot succeed.
保护冲突在当代保护学术研究中变得越来越重要，以至于保护可能已经进入了一个冲突炒作的阶段。我们试图通过提出几个问题来揭示和解构这些研究背后的规范假设：什么是保护冲突，是什么让它们受到关注，保护冲突研究是否限制了野生动物保护，在保护冲突中，科学知识是否对野生动物不利，保护冲突研究是否采用了特定的民主观点，法律是否可以用来强制保护结果，为什么在管理保护冲突时需要灵活性，是否可以通过促进宽容来管理保护冲突，以及在保护冲突中谁需要妥协？我们认为，该领域中的许多知识前提可能会削弱保护的力量，使其无法真正应对当前保护危机的加速。通过将保护冲突描述为人们对野生动物或自然的冲突，该领域将罪责悄然转移，从而不再将物种减少和灭绝归咎于人类活动，而是将责任归咎于保护活动引发了社会冲突。当焦点是在不限制对自然造成损害的人类活动的情况下减轻社会冲突时，保护冲突研究就有可能将保护限制在人类活动的范围内，而不是将人类活动限制在自然的范围内。为了使保护成功阻止生物多样性危机，我们建议将承认自然存在的权利作为替代目标，以维护生态功能和进化过程。将自然视为权利主体或法人，意味着在冲突裁决中必须明确考虑其需求。如果即使在保护中，自然利益也次于人类利益，那么保护无法成功也就不足为奇了。
