Essay: High Seas Conservation in the Southern Ocean

High Seas Conservation at the Bottom of the World:
Collaborative Governance, Participatory Mapping, and Conservation Opportunity in the Southern Ocean
The Context: The Sixth Mass Extinction
In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that according to the IUCN Red List between 12% and 52% of various well-studied, higher-order taxa were at risk of extinction (Mace et al., 2005). The Assessment also found that nine of the fourteen biomes assessed had seen between 20% and 50% of their area converted to cropland or otherwise degraded, and that “humans may have increased the species extinction rate by at least three orders of magnitude” (Mace et al., 2005). Similarly, the World Wildlife Fund’s 2016 Living Planet Report detailed a 36% reduction in the abundance of marine species between 1970 and 2012 (WWF, 2016).
These staggering declines in biodiversity are primarily attributed to habitat degradation, overexploitation, pollution, invasive species, and climate change, and threaten the very systems upon which humanity relies for food, water, the regulation of key ecological processes, and more (Cardinale, 2012; Ceballos, Ehrlich, & Dirzo, 2017; Díaz, Fargione, Chapin, & Tilman, 2006; Hassan & Scholes, 2005; Worm et al., 2006). Recent analyses have indicated that the idea of ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ nature no longer exists, and that even the furthest corners of global oceans, which cover over 70% of the planet, have been impacted by human activities such as industrial overfishing (Halpern et al., 2008; Kareiva & Marvier, 2012; Pauly et al., 2005).
Global Responses to Biodiversity Loss
Recognizing the interconnected and global nature of environmental problems and that individual states would need to voluntarily agree to coordinated policy responses, the international community has responded by developing a complex international environmental regime focused on combatting climate change, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss (DeSombre, 2007; Keohane & Victor, 2011). Consisting of treaties and conventions (the Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD), institutions and secretariats (the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP, or International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, IUCN), and declarations of intent or guidelines (the Aichi Targets, IUCN MPA Guidelines, or Sustainable Development Goals), this new regime has sought to develop an integrated response to reversing downward trends in the status of the planet’s natural resources (DeSombre, 2007; Jinnah, 2014).
Figure 1. Map showing the current extent of global marine protected areas excluding the RSRMPA. 6.97% of the ocean is contained within MPAs and 2.25% are no-take. Source: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2018).
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was one such agreement that opened for signature at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and was intended to promote “the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.” A key element of this conservation framework was the encouragement of protected areas as tools to combat declines in global biodiversity (DeSombre, 2007a; Spalding, Meliane, Milam, Fitzgerald, & Hale, 2013). In 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, participants began a gradual process of setting quantitative targets for marine protected area coverage that culminated in the 2011 Aichi Targets’ directive to set aside 10% of coastal and marine areas to safeguard “ecosystems, species, and genetic diversity” by 2020 (Convention on Biological Diversity & United Nations Environment Programme, 2011; Klein et al., 2015).
From an scientific standpoint, there is now significant evidence that marine protected areas (MPAs) can help to slow biodiversity loss and habitat degradation by setting aside representative samples of biodiversity and separating them from the “processes that threaten [their] persistence” (Bruner, Gullison, Rice, & Da Fonseca, 2001; Edgar et al., 2011; Groves, 2003; McCook et al., n.d.). MPAs come in a variety of forms and can be designed to address a wide range of goals related to fisheries management, climate change adaptation, and biodiversity conservation (Green et al., 2014; McLeod, Salm, Green, & Almany, 2009; Singleton & Roberts, 2014; Walmsley & White, 2003). Yet the most common threat facing marine ecosystems is overfishing (Chown et al., 2012; Pauly et al., 2005). As a result, mixed use or no take marine reserves have been designed with the intention of reducing fishing pressure, protecting spawning and nursery grounds, and even rebuilding nearby fisheries (Gaines, White, Carr, & Palumbi, 2010; Halpern, 2014).
Figure 2. The growth in the number of signatories to major international environmental agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity or Montreal Agreement (Martino et al., 2007).
Challenges to this Framework
Over time, this approach of relying on international environmental agreements to manage transnational environmental problems has come under considerable scrutiny for a variety of reasons (Leenhardt, Cazalet, Salvat, Claudet, & Feral, 2013; Singleton & Roberts, 2014). For one, many scholars question the effectiveness of international environmental regimes and their ability to manage or resolve the environmental challenges that led to their creation (Keohane & Victor, 2011; Young, 2011). A wide variety of research from both institutional (mainly political science) and economic perspectives has found mixed results, with some governance regimes proving much more successful than others in both outcomes and process (e.g., the Montreal Protocol and the Antarctic Treaty System vs. the Kyoto Protocol and the Ramsar Convention) (DeSombre, 2007b).
Besides this, the shortcomings of such a system have become apparent over time with one of the most pronounced being the lack of authority to manage areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ)—areas more commonly referred to as the high seas (Ban, Bax, et al., 2013a; Gjerde, 2012). International environmental regimes have sought to develop (and sometimes attained—e.g. the Montreal Protocol) coordinated responses to transboundary challenges such as persistent organic pollutants and climate change (see: Keohane & Victor, 2011; Young, 2011). But efforts to develop internationally recognized and managed marine protected areas have been less successful, with only a handful of international environmental organizations successfully establishing any in ABNJ. The Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) and the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) are the two exceptions that have been able to negotiate and establish MPAs in the high seas (Conservation Measure 91-05, 2016; Grant, 2012; Miller & Slicer, 2014; Smith & Jabour, 2017).
Similarly, it has become clear that the establishment of MPAs is often subject to arbitrary decision-making processes and has therefore sometimes produced only limited benefits to wildlife and ecosystems, reduced economic opportunity for human communities, and even reinforced disparities in access to resources (De Santo, 2013; Levine, 2007; Levine, Richmond, & Lopez-Carr, 2015; Mascia, Claus, & Naidoo, 2010; Walmsley & White, 2003). The international community was cognizant of this connection between environmental degradation and human well-being when it implemented the Convention on Biological Diversity, hence the references within the Convention to sustainable development, the rights of indigenous peoples, the value of traditional ecological knowledge, etc. (Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992; Levy et al., 2005).
In response to these shortcomings, numerous conferences (e.g. the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and the 2012 Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20)) and declarations (2010 Aichi Targets) have sought to further clarify and re-affirm the international community’s commitment to human well-being and designing “equitably managed” MPAs (Ban, Bax, et al., 2013a; Convention on Biological Diversity & United Nations Environment Programme, 2011). Besides a genuine concern about human rights and a sense of social responsibility (Lubchenco, 1998) there is growing evidence that MPAs are more difficult, and maybe impossible, to sustain over time without community-level buy-in, which in the international environmental arena translates into compliance with, support for, and implementation of the actual treaty, convention, or protocol (Day, 2017; Walmsley & White, 2003). Even beyond the MPA literature, public administration and collaborative governance theory suggest that community-level support is necessary for the successful implementation and management of protected areas (Innes & Booher, 1999) and systematic conservation planners (see: Ban, Knight, Margules, Pressey, etc.) are strong proponents of the idea that “people are the currency of conservation initiatives, and the purpose of conservation is not to only ensure the persistence of nature but also to help present and future generations of people live to their potential, live healthy enriched lives, and be engaged with the nature of which they are a part” (Knight, Cowling, & Campbell, 2006).
Research Objectives & Questions
Environmental regimes do not appear out of nowhere; they are established to manage resources or in response to environmental crises (e.g. landscape preservation or oil spills), and are, to some degree, an outcome in and of themselves (e.g. the Paris Agreement may not set binding emissions reduction targets, but it does serve as a global statement of intent and successful negotiation) (Vogler, 2000b). This is even more the case for international environmental regimes—if states were able to independently respond to and resolve the challenges posed by climate change, transboundary air pollution, or conserving migratory species, then they would have no incentive to partner with others and build complex systems of governance (Ansell & Gash, 2007; DeSombre, 2007a). But some regimes are more effective at addressing the catalyzing problem than others, which naturally leads us to wonder about the factors leading to that variation (Young, 2011). In the case of global marine ecosystems, what are the factors that have contributed to successful efforts to establish MPAs in areas beyond national jurisdiction and how might they be replicated?
Second, recent experiences with establishing MPAs have shown that socioeconomic factors play a key role in their long-term stability and effectiveness (Knight et al., 2006; Walmsley & White, 2003). However, conservation planners are rarely trained in social science data collection methods and therefore struggle to collect appropriate data, and frequently lack the technical skills and analytic approaches needed to develop spatial data layers representing the costs and opportunities that will ultimately shape conservation assessments and the subsequent MPA proposals (Ban, Mills, et al., 2013b; Kittinger et al., 2014; Weeks, Russ, Bucol, & Alcala, 2010).
As a result, socioeconomic data is less frequently incorporated during the technical stages of conservation planning efforts in the same spatial format as ecological data such as species distribution and abundance (Brooks, Da Fonseca, & Rodrigues, 2004; Knight et al., 2006). This in turn leads to a less structured, less transparent, and more difficult to replicate processes, which incorporate socioeconomic concerns after conservation assessments and site selection has taken place (Ban, Mills, et al., 2013b; Knight et al., 2006; Margules & Pressey, 2000). The natural question, then, is how might scientists employ other methodological approaches to gathering socioeconomic data and transforming it into spatial formats that can inform conservation planning efforts and thereby improve the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of marine protected areas?
To answer these questions, I propose investigating how international environmental regimes can build on and replicate successful efforts to establish high seas MPAs, while simultaneously incorporating broader socioeconomic concerns and human use patterns into marine conservation planning efforts to increase stakeholder support for conservation efforts, and improve compliance and effective management. I will accomplish this by focusing on the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), an international environmental agreement that has successfully established MPAs, and where socioeconomic concerns have thus far shaped outcomes in unstructured and informal ways. The objectives of my dissertation chapters will be to:
1. Describe the process by which participants designated the Ross Sea Region MPA, and identify the key factors that led to that agreement;
2. Use participatory mapping techniques to structure the collection and transformation of expert knowledge about human use patterns in the Antarctic into spatial datasets;
3. Compare data on human use patterns from various sources and approaches to integrating them to develop cost/opportunity layers for conducting conservation assessments analyses.
To achieve these research objectives, my dissertation will be structured as three separate chapters that answer each of the following questions:
1) How was the Ross Sea Region MPA established and what were the key factors that led to consensus among participants?
2) How can socioeconomic knowledge be gathered and transformed into spatial datasets to underpin more structured approaches to conservation assessments?
3) How can various types and formats of socioeconomic data be integrated to develop more complete cost or opportunity layers, and how can this process be structured to provide a more transparent indication of what the outputs mean for decision-makers?
In the following pages, I will present further information on the underlying theory that informs these questions, the evidence that will provide me with the insights I seek to discover, the methods that I propose to collect said evidence, and the test case that I will investigate with the hope of learning lessons that are applicable elsewhere.
The Case of the Southern Ocean
The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is the international agreement responsible for managing the marine environment surrounding Antarctica (also commonly referred to as the Southern Ocean). Entering into force in 1982, CCAMLR’s primary goal is “safeguarding the environment and protecting the integrity of the ecosystem of the seas surrounding Antarctica” (Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, 1982). CCAMLR was one of the first international environmental agreements to articulate the importance of ecosystem-based management (EBM), and has also been at the forefront of efforts to institute pre-emptive fisheries closures, protections for scientifically valuable populations of wildlife, and to establish a network of high seas MPAs (Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, 1982; Grant, 2012).
CCAMLR presents an excellent case for studying international environmental collaboration and incorporating socioeconomic considerations into conservation planning for areas beyond national jurisdiction for two main reasons. First, CCAMLR is widely considered to be one of the most effective international environmental agreements (Ban, Bax, et al., 2013a; Bodin & Österblom, 2013; Miller & Slicer, 2014; Österblom & Olsson, 2017) and remains the only international body to have successfully established MPAs in the high seas (Smith & Jabour, 2017). Although OSPAR has established a spatial management regime in the North Atlantic, unlike CCAMLR it does not hold the authority to manage all human uses; notably shipping and fisheries. As a result, OSPAR must coordinate enforcement and management with other organizations to achieve their objectives (Smith & Jabour, 2017).
Second, the Southern Ocean’s remote and harsh environment as well as the Antarctic Treaty’s prohibition on military bases and weapons testing and promotion of international cooperation and scientific inquiry, results in a more limited range of human activities than are found in places such as the North Sea or Mediterranean, where decision-makers must account for a wider range of uses when designing regulatory frameworks, e.g. recreational fishing, energy exploration, or defense (The Antarctic Treaty, 1959).  The lack of a local population of year-round inhabitants means that human use patterns
Figure 3. The CCAMLR management area with fisheries and proposed marine protected areas. Source: Brooks et al. (2016).
are more limited and legible, as opposed to more expansive and difficult to interpret; in other words, they are easier to detect, monitor, and gather data on (St Martin & Hall-Arber, 2008). For example, CCAMLR carefully tracks commercial fishing within the Convention zone and monitors catches and fish stocks to a greater extent than is frequently possible in places like the Coral Triangle, East Africa, or Baja California, where subsistence fishing is prevalent. As a result, it is simpler to account for and incorporate human use into spatial planning efforts and, for research purposes, it controls for confounding factors that complicate understanding the underlying social-ecological system.
Although the combined effect of the region’s geography and the Antarctic Treaty are a reduction in the number of human activities, it does not mean that social, economic, and political concerns should not be accounted for in planning efforts. Fisheries, tourism, shipping, and scientific research activities significantly impact the Antarctic marine environment and must be made legible to ensure the effectiveness of spatial management efforts. As shown in the conservation planning and social-ecological systems literature, community-level buy-in is important because it improves the likelihood of successful implementation and compliance with environmental agreements (Ban, Mills, et al., 2013b; Ostrom, 1990). This is especially so in the case of international agreements such as CCAMLR where states cannot be compelled (except through force) to do anything, and consensus is required for decision-making (Keohane & Victor, 2011).
The first chapter of my dissertation will focus on the Ross Sea region marine protected area (RSRMPA or RSMPA), which continues to be the world’s largest at 1.55 million km2, while the second and third will focus on the waters surrounding the West Antarctic Peninsula. The RSRMPA was negotiated over several years, was the first MPA established under Conservation Measure 91-04, and is the most recent example of this global trend towards using MPAs as an ecosystem management tool. While the RSRMPA’s implementation has been widely framed as a ‘success’ by proponents and the media, the question remains whether this is a conservation success, or solely a political success. In other words, besides questions about eventual outcomes (which are beyond the scope of this dissertation), there remain significant questions about process and whether the RSRMPA negotiations and designation provide an operational blueprint for global efforts (mainly led by the United Nations) to establish MPAs in other areas beyond national jurisdiction. Although the process began with ecosystem assessments, it did not explicitly incorporate the social, economic, or political elements that informally shaped the negotiations and may shape future proposals.
In the following pages, I propose the three component chapters of my dissertation.
Chapter 1: Collaborative Governance in the Southern Oceans: The Ross Sea MPA
International environmental regimes are widely seen as a key approach to resolving complex, transboundary environmental issues (Jinnah, 2014; Keohane & Victor, 2011). However, international environmental regimes have had mixed results addressing the underlying problems that motivate their creation or affecting the behavior of participating states (DeSombre, 2007b). While this variation in success may have once posed a perplexing problem for those studying regime effectiveness, years of research focused on institutional design, organizational theory, and individual behavior have provided us with the tools needed for gaining insights into what leads to the success or failure of international regimes (Ostrom, 2009; Vogler, 2000a; Young, 2011).
My research seeks to describe the process by which participants designated the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area (RSRMPA), identify the key factors that led to that agreement, and use the findings to inform ongoing efforts to establish MPAs in areas beyond national jurisdiction. In other words, why was consensus reached on Conservation Measure 91-05 (the RSRMPA) and what were the factors that led to its successful passage? My final goal in asking these questions is to understand how the findings might inform ongoing efforts to establish MPAs in other ABNJ. In the words of institutional regime analyst Oran Young, “can we formulate conclusions that will be of interest both to
Figure 4. The Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area and constituent management zones. Source: New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2018).
those responsible for implementing the provisions of environmental regimes and those people engaged in efforts either to strengthen existing arrangements or create entirely new ones?”
To inform my analysis, I draw on the existing literature from several fields of study: institutional or regime analysis, commons theory, and public administration’s subfield of collaborative governance. In the past, international relations, comparative politics, and political economy have provided the dominant theory guiding inquiries into international environmental governance and regime effectiveness, as well as the development of international environmental politics as a subfield in its own right (L. M. Campbell, Corson, Gray, MacDonald, & Brosius, 2014; O’Neill et al., 2013). But these fields of study have since developed in response to a different set of questions and actors (Pattberg, 2012). Whereas ‘government’ was once solely the province of nation-states, ‘governance’ is a broader affair; over time global civil society has matured, new actors have entered the arena, and their impacts have been studied and documented. It has therefore become clear that the former focus on formal mechanisms, rules, and regulations for decision-making overlooks both the role of various constituencies such as the media and NGOs, as well as that of the individual and their ability to impact outcomes and affect change (Corson, Campbell, & MacDonald, 2014; Keohane & Victor, 2011).
As a result, my research into what factors lead to successful environmental agreements in the international arena must naturally supplement the traditional institutional analysis/ international relations/political science literature. Public administrators have long grappled (since the beginnings of American Federalism, scholars argue) with the challenge of how to allocate scarce resources (McGuire, 2006). In recent decades the prevalence of co-management regimes in natural and public trust resource management has arisen from a distrust in managerial approaches in which public agencies make unilateral decisions and has resulted in a new scholarly focus on collaborative governance (Ansell & Gash, 2007; Selin & Chavez, 1995). Scholars have defined collaborative governance as “a governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets,” (Ansell & Gash, 2007). The primary focus of the field has been on understanding the conditions under which stakeholders participate in collaborative consensus-building (Ansell & Gash, 2007), on the roles and leadership styles that participants can fill (Ansell & Gash, 2012), and how frameworks can be used to analyze the broader context within which collaborative governance is initiated, the collaborative governance regime (CGR) itself, and collaborative dynamics of participants (Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2011).
In many ways, collaborative governance emerged from the same public administration school of thought that gave rise to the works of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. Their research focused on collective action, property rights, institutional design, and the mechanisms by which stakeholders can sustainably manage common pool resources (Ostrom, 1990) Over time, these insights evolved into a framework for assessing social-ecological systems, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and implementing solutions to improve their performance (Ostrom, 2009a). These works influence both the collaborative governance literature, as well as my own research into CCAMLR.
To achieve my first objective and understand the key factors that lead to successful environmental agreements, I hypothesize that variable outcomes result from more than just institutional arrangements and the formal rules that govern decision-making. Instead, the literature suggests that collaboration depends on “achieving a virtuous cycle between communication, trust, commitment, understanding, and outcomes” (Ansell & Gash, 2007; Huxham, 2003). In other words, individuals matter and certain factors such as face-to-face dialogue, trust building, leadership, and a shared commitment and understanding are vital to achieving consensus in collaborative settings (Ansell & Gash, 2007; 2012; Corson et al., 2014; Emerson et al., 2011; Innes & Booher, 1999).
To collect the evidence needed to support or refute my hypothesis, I have relied upon semi-structured interviews (Bernard, 2011; Creswell, 1998b) and modified traditional ethnographic research methods (Creswell, 1998a) for use at CCAMLR’s annual negotiations (Yin, 1994), which I have twice attended as a delegation member with the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC). Although ethnographic research prioritizes embedding the researcher within a ‘field site’ for extended periods, learning the local language and customs, and ‘going native’ to some extent, over time, researchers have applied ethnographic methods to the study of institutions so that they may gain greater insights into “bureaucratic culture and political processes” (Corson, Campbell, & MacDonald, 2014; Creswell, 1998).
International environmental meetings also pose a challenge to ethnographic methods because of the speed at which they form and dissipate. However, these shortened timeframes allow researchers to fully immerse themselves for the entirety of the event (L. M. Campbell et al., 2014). In fact, the ability to cover the full lifespan of the event, along with ongoing dialogue in the form of public announcements, listservs, or organizing events, means that researchers may in fact achieve greater levels of relative ‘immersion’ than most ethnographers are normally able to due to the fact that most communities do not have a fixed lifespan over which they rise and fall through time (O’Neill et al., 2013). This immersion was the main value I gained from attending the 2016 and 2017 CCAMLR Annual Meetings because, due to confidentiality agreements, I remain unable to reference the meeting content or quote individuals in my research. As a result, I decided to conduct interviews with delegates and observers who participated in the RSRMPA negotiations over the past several years.
The first step in my data collection consisted of developing a series of interview questions that: 1) provide background on the interviewee and highlight positionality biases; 2) documents the process of negotiation of the RSRMPA; 3) provide insights into the key factors that contributed to the RSRMPA agreement; 4) provide information on relationships, partnerships, and leadership; 5) allow participants to contribute any final reflections not yet communicated in response to previous questions; and 6) support ongoing research priorities, i.e., provide additional information or leads to follow-up on, identify additional participants. The full set of questions that was drafted and approved by Duke University’s Institutional Research Board (Protocol #20187-0072) is included below in Appendix A.
Second, from my population of those who participate in CCAMLR’s annual negotiations, I selected an initial list of participants. This list prioritized Heads of Delgation (HoDs) and chief scientific advisors since these two individuals are the delegation leads in the Scientific Committee meeting and Commission meeting that take place weeks one and two of CCAMLR’s annual fall negotiations. I then checked the online registration system and removed those who would not be attending the 2017 meeting. Turnover varies among delegations, with some experiencing higher levels due to a reliance on foreign service officers to fill positions often assigned to civilians. Officers are ‘posted’ for a set number of years to vacancies before being transferred to new positions—Argentina and France are two such countries with high delegation turnover.
I then re-checked individuals on this third list with a handful of well-informed individuals for feedback, who then suggested minor revisions based on their familiarity with proposed participants. I then removed those who others suggested would be less knowledgeable about the RSRMPA for a variety of reasons (short tenure in their position, delegation of the Ross Sea topic to someone else on the delegation, etc.). This created a final list from twelve key countries and a handful of NGOs and industry groups who I then began to contact in September of 2017 to invite to participate. The emails included a short description of the project, my request to interview them, a set of guidelines under which we would be working, and a release form ensuring that they understood the confidential nature of the work and agreeing to be taped during the interview.
If individuals did not respond, I continued to attempt to contact them, and as a last result, I approached them in person in Hobart. Results were mixed, with some participants agreeing to be interviewed and others declining. If they declined, I asked for a referral to someone else from their delegation who they believed might be willing to talk. I also employed a snowball method with delegations where only a single participant had responded to my invitation and I was seeking additional respondents. Finally, for every individual interviewed (time permitting), I asked who they believed would be most important for me to speak with, which provided a level of triangulation and allowed me to double-check that I was interviewing individuals who played a key role in the RSRMPA negotiations.
Interviews were then conducted opportunistically—during morning or afternoon coffee breaks, before and after the days’ meetings took convened, over the intervening weekend, in closets, parking lots, cafes and bars. Recordings were conducted on an iPhone and computer. Several days, I completed a single interview, while on one day I completed four, with an average of two or three per day. By the conclusion of the negotiations, I had completed 23 interviews ranging between 22 and 105 minutes long, with an average length of roughly 40 minutes. Over the next two months, I conducted another seven interviews, and received three written responses, for a total set of 33 interviews.
Data collection concluded after interviewing a minimum number of representatives from all of the key state and non-state actors (NGOs and industry groups), and upon determining that saturation had been reached, i.e. that participants’ responses were no longer providing new material. In total, participants represented fifteen countries and five non-state delegations. This represents a significant cross section of CCAMLR’s twenty-five signatory states, plus observer groups, that send roughly 250 people to the annual negotiations at the Secretariat in Hobart, Tasmania. Russia was the only state in which repeated invitations, both electronic and in person, were declined. Over a dozen individuals from other delegations indicated they would be happy to talk if needed at a later date.
Data transcription is ongoing, but the final documents will be coded and analyzed in QSR Nvivo 11 software for recurring themes and patterns. Preliminary findings suggest that trust and leadership were key elements that led to the 2016 RSRMPA agreement, and that interpersonal relations play a much larger role that has previously been reported in the literature, validating what collaborative governance led me to hypothesize from the beginning.
Chapter 2: Participatory Mapping Methods for Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction: Conservation Opportunity in the Southern Ocean
At the same time that a complex international environmental regime was being established to coordinate global conservation efforts, it was quickly becoming apparent that poorly implemented protected areas could unintentionally reduce food and income security, exacerbate human-wildlife conflicts, alter gender dynamics, and even reinforce various forms of inequality (De Santo, 2013; Mascia, Claus, & Naidoo, 2010; Walmsley & White, 2003). As a result, protected area advocates such as the IUCN-World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) began incorporate human well-being into international conservation targets such as Aichi Target 18 (Convention on Biological Diversity & United Nations Environment Programme, 2011), and conservation planners, recognizing that the social, economic, and political characteristics of communities and governance systems significantly shape outcomes, began experimenting with the concept of conservation opportunity (also commonly referred to as ‘feasibility’), which essentially represents the potential for successfully implementing conservation actions (Knight & Cowling, 2007; Moon & Blackman, 2014; Raymond, 2014).
Systematic conservation planning (SCP) initially evolved in response to criticisms of opportunistic approaches to establishing protected areas. Conservation biologists sought to develop a structured and defensible method for establishing protected areas that relied solely on quantitative, ecological data to achieve biodiversity goals and maximize levels of species richness and complementarity within them (Knight et al., 2006; Levin et al., 2013; Margules & Pressey, 2000). However, recognizing that social, economic, and political factors shape outcomes led conservation planners now sought to re-integrate these ‘messier’ socioeconomic considerations back into conservation (Mills et al., 2013) because while ecological data determines potential effectiveness, social considerations shape actual effectiveness. At first, social considerations were framed as ‘threats’ or ‘costs’ (Ban & Klein, 2009; Naidoo et al., 2006) because, for better or for worse, conservation biologists are rarely trained in social science methods (Bennett et al., 2017; Kittinger et al., 2014), are often primarily concerned with ecological data and worry that “biodiversity priority will be obfuscated or compromised unless based purely on biological information” (Carwardine et al., 2008).
However, researchers rethought this approach in light of evidence that framing socioeconomic factors as ‘conservation opportunities’ circumvented the challenges often associated with implementing species-centric approaches, improved the long-term stability, compliance and effectiveness of protected areas, and significantly increased the efficient use of scarce resources (Ban, Picard, & Vincent, 2009; Yaffee & Wondolleck, 2000). The development of Marxan with Zones also made it methodologically possible to incorporate more than one opportunity and set multiple parameters during conservation assessments (Mangubhai, Wilson, Rumetna, Maturbongs, Purwanto, 2015; Watts et al., 2009).
As researchers have re-integrated social considerations into conservation planning and developed the concept of conservation opportunity, which essentially measures the feasibility of taking conservation action, many turned to the social-ecological systems literature because it provided a structured framework for linking both ecological data with social, economic, and political characteristics (Ban, Mills, et al., 2013b; Raymond, 2014). While vital for implementing successful conservation interventions, finding an “operationally useful conceptualization of conservation opportunity” that can be used to guide research has proven elusive (Moon et al., 2014). As Christopher Raymond notes in his in introduction to a special issue of Conservation Biology focused on the topic of conservation opportunity, there are two outstanding issues that remain: 1) is “a lack of conceptual clarity about how to identify and define the construct,” and 2) is developing a reliable set of indicators for measuring ‘conservation opportunity’ (Raymond, 2014).
Figure 5. Moon et al.’s (2014) “five stages of conservation opportunity identification or creation as they relate to priming a system for … achieving the desired system state.”
One approach to resolving this quandary is that of Moon et al. (2014), who sought to identify three types of conservation opportunity—Potential, Traction, and Existing—that can be used to structure analysis and determine the best tactic for implementing conservation actions within a given social-ecological system. Potential opportunity exists when actors can identify barriers to action that can be removed to restructure the system and provide new openings for dialogue, decision-making, or action. Traction opportunity is often brief and results from events or shocks to the system that create “windows of opportunity” that temporarily allow barriers to be surmounted. Finally, existing opportunity is an ongoing state in which analysts determine that no barriers remain and there is a way to implement conservation actions. By characterizing the system and defining problems, identifying potential solutions, assessing the feasibility of those solutions, identifying the current type of opportunity, and taking advantage of it or implementing actions to change it from potential to existing, a way forward can be outlined (Moon et al., 2014).
As Raymond noted, developing a coherent understanding of opportunity is difficult because it “is not a static concept and can be seen as an emergent property that becomes more complex with the addition of more social and biophysical attributes into analyses” (Raymond, 2014). Additionally, despite significant improvements in conservation assessments and steps towards conceptual framings of ‘conservation opportunity,’ there still remains a significant “knowing-doing” or “research-implementation gap” around the measurement of it (Knight et al., 2008; Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999). Therefore, building upon both existing literature on the subject and Moon’s framework, chapter two will investigate conservation opportunities in the Southern Ocean with the goal of bridging this gap and developing planning-relevant spatial data on conservation opportunity. At present, socioeconomic considerations represent a ‘missing layer’ in Antarctic conservation decision-making and “while the biophysical environment is being mapped in ever greater detail and incorporated into systems of spatial analysis, the ‘social landscape’ … remains largely undocumented” (St Martin & Hall-Arber, 2008). This research seeks to incorporate human activity into conservation planning efforts and develop methods that can be replicated in other Antarctic planning domains such as the Peninsula or Weddell Sea (Ban, Mills, et al., 2013b; Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992).