Dan Brockington

At the heart of the long-term livelihood change project is the question ‘is Tanzania’s growing national economic prosperity visible in its rural areas?’. If ever there was an archetypal place to seek answers to this question, it would be the village of Mtowisa, down in the Rift Valley, close to Lake Rukwa in Rukwa region (southwest Tanzania), where I lived there for almost a year between 1999 and 2000 as part of a post-doctoral research fellowship. The village is not far, as the crow flies, from the regional capital of Sumbawanga, which is barely 15km away. But the flying crow has an easier route than humans, as it can soar over the 1200m escarpment that separated the town from the village. Residents had to walk between the two, else brave a long and difficult journey on bad roads. This was a village that felt far from anywhere, where most people were small-scale farmers, cultivating 2 acres or so. Only 20% of families owned cattle and then but small herds. Most lived in simple grass-rooved houses. Mtowisa in 2000, had not really been touched by 10 years of economic growth that had already occurred in Tanzania – how has it fared in the 16 years of strong economic growth between 2000 and now?

I returned to Mtowisa in August 2016 interviewing 64 domestic units, local shopkeepers and government officials, travelling to neighbouring villages and fishing camps with friends, visiting new irrigation schemes and holding two village meetings (for women and men). Revisiting the place was a wonderful experience. All through the visit I had people complaining that I was not coming to their house to do the survey: ‘njoo uniandikie mimi pia’, (come and write about me, too) was a common refrain (only one person refused to take part). It was unusual to have to think up reasons why I could not do so. I’m afraid my Swahili was not up to explaining the importance of a random sample.

At first sight the changes to the village appeared remarkable. Transport to the place is much improved with year round bus-services. The village centre was transformed. I had known it as a sleepy place with one major shop and a small hospital, where cars came infrequently, and motorbikes were rare. Now there were numerous shops, nearly 20 bodaboda (motorcycle taxis), gas and electric welding (the latter run on a powerful generator), several phone shops and a well-equipped hardware store. The hospital had an operating theatre and there were lots of solar powered lights (and stereos, making the place a much louder one at night). There is a large phone tower in the village (since 2008).

There was an abundance of metal roofed homes, and many single rooms being rented. Numerous pigs roamed the streets or were kept in small compounds near people’s houses (these had also been unusual in 2000). The small irrigation furrows I had left behind were still present, and indeed had expanded in number. In the dry season they were used (since about 2012) to cultivate tomatoes, cabbage and onions and there were around 10 petrol powered pumps which withdrew river water to pump to near by farms.

 But the presence of these changes, does not answer the question posed above. What matters is how this apparent wealth and new business had affected the lives of the poorer farmers of Mtowisa. Were these changes welcome to them? Did them benefit from them?

To explore this I drew upon a survey of 800 plus domestic units I had conducted in 2000. I selected 64 units to revisit and compared their asset ownership to their state in 2000, and to the asset ownership of domestic units with similarly aged heads in 2000. My original survey did not include many wealthy Sukuma immigrants, and the new sample included no domestic unit heads below 35 years old. But it still provides useful insights into the condition of older domestic units.

The differences can be very simply stated. Older families in Mtowisa now enjoy higher levels of prosperity, as measured in assets, than they did 16 years ago. They enjoy higher levels of prosperity than their counterparts of an equivalent age expected to achieve in 2000. They are wealthier because of their farming, and, in particular because they are selling more cash crops, specifically sunflower seeds and sesame, with the latter providing the most substantial change.

The evidence for this change is as follows. First, with respect to key measures of herd and plough ownership the sample visited is wealthier than it was in the past, and compared to the group of similar aged domestic unit heads in 2000 (see Table 1). Oxen ownership has increased by half (and if we include oxen borrowed from wealthy Sukuma patrons it doubles to 41%). Pig ownership has increased dramatically, and ownership of ploughs has more than doubled.

Second, with respect to farming activity, people are simply farming more. They are farming larger areas than they were previously, with fewer 2 acre farms in particular and more farms over 5 acres. Younger families (of those over 35) are more industrious than they were previously. All families are farming more cash crops, with proportionally less maize is grown than before. The decline in the proportion of maize is due to more farming of sunflowers and sesame. Third, housing quality has improved, particularly with the spread of metal roofing, as these pictures show.

These depict houses in 2003, 2010 and 2013 with houses built in the interval between the photos ringed in blue and yellow respectively.

The other source of evidence on housing change are the narratives that I was told repeatedly by many people: that they had been able to invest in their houses because of their farming activity. It is a very simple story, but no less heartening for that. The narratives demonstrates when the changes in people’s homes and other assets occurred and why. Figure 1 shows what people were purchasing, and when.

This figure demonstrates that the scale of the investments are considerable, if quite recent. The main reason for that growth in investment, as shows, is the increased sales of sesame and sunflower seeds.

After 2010 farmers were able to yield fantastic returns, of, I was told, between 250,000/= and 300,000/= per sack of sesame. This is more than enough for a roll of metal roofing, and only two rolls would be required to roof a standard sized house. One story illustrates well the joy and surprise that these returns caused to farmers in Mtowisa. I was told that one farmer (we will call him Darius), who I met in the survey work and who had not been particularly industrious or wealthy in 2000, went up to Sumbawanga to sell his sesame in 2011. This was a collective enterprise, with many farmers loading their harvest onto the lorry of the local shop owner to take it to the depot in Sumbawanga where better prices can be realized. On receiving his payment for two sacks of sesame (500,000/=) Darius was simply left shock (amekaa bubuwazi). He sat down in a corner of the weighing room, still full of the hustle and bustle of heavy sacks being moved, weighed and paid for, because he had never in his life expected to have so much money. His friends had to guide him to a guest house where he could safely spend the night. The next day he had recovered sufficiently to buy metal sheets for a new house (which are also much less easily stolen than money). He built a new house that year and extended it the year after following further sales. It is because of repeated stories like Darius’ that the appearance of Mtowisa, and the daily lives of so many of its residents have been so thoroughly changed. Higher sesame seed prices have given a substantial cash injection to many people’s livelihoods.

A Universal Improvement?

Altogether 66% of the sample had experienced an increase in assets in some way over the previous 16 years – but what subtler changes does this bald statistic conceal? There are two general trends to note. First, the improvement in assets is general across most wealth groups, but richer, more industrious families, have tended to be able to benefit from the cash crop returns more than families who were poorer and farming less in 2000.

Older people, female headed domestic units, and smaller families tended to improve their asset base less than younger, male-headed, larger units. This trend reflects changes in the lifecycle of domestic units where older people farm less, where widows also farm less, and where both tend to support fewer dependents.  This means that, had the sample been more representative of village society, and had fewer older people and fewer domestic units headed by widows then it is likely to have had more instances of successful asset growth.

Nonetheless the general conclusion from these trends is that, within the constraints of age and senescence, the injection of resources that the recent cash crop boom has provided has been remarkably catholic. Access to this resource was not restricted to existing asset rich households (although an existing asset base clearly helped). Any family able to manage its affairs wisely, and enjoying a modicum of good luck, was able to benefit.

Finally, it bears repeating that assets are but one aspect of prosperity. The families I visited, in the main, had enjoyed a recent cash injection from which they had invested in assets. But there are many other dimensions of poverty that remain untouched by this welcome change. The standards and ease of accessing health and educational services, care for the long term sick and elderly, basic measures of dignity and so on are all ignored by this survey. Our methods and sources do not allow us to make the long term comparisons required to document the changes (or lack thereof) that have occurred here. But that does not make them any less important.

Answering the Question: the national economy and rural prosperity

Assets matter. Many of the Fipa families with whom I spoke place considerable significance on the major purchases that they will need to make in order to have a good life and provide for their children. They will need to buy a plot (150,000/=), build a good house (300,000 – 500,000/=), buy land (400,000/= an acre for unirrigated land), buy oxen (200,000/= a head) and a plough (150,000/=). And most of the families in this sample were taking significant steps in building that asset base.

But how do these changes answer the original question with which we began? To what extent are rural areas benefitting from economic growth in the nation as a whole? The answer in the case of Mtowisa, is rather ambiguous. The direct connections between economic growth and local changes in prosperity are surprisingly hard to demonstrate.

Some of the changes that took place here do not seem to depend on changes to transport provision and road quality. The sesame seed price rise took place some time after the local road had been completed, and before the metalled road between Mbeya and Sumbawanga had been built. Many of the assets (land, burned bricks, timber for rooves and oxen) can be locally sourced. Moreover the continued lack of provision of key services that are the state’s responsibility (water, TASAF social security payments for the elderly and extremely poor) mean that despite the state’s growing prosperity residents of Mtowisa remain as disadvantaged as ever.

Other aspects of the changes are likely to be connected to national economic change. The availability of metal roofing sheets and ploughs, and the price of some crops will reflect national change. But it is unlikely that these are well connected to the sectors which have, apparently, been driving Tanzanian economic growth in recent years.

But if this has been a case of separate development it is likely that, in the future, the fortunes of this village will be tied to the country’s more powerfully than before. Agricultural activity will continue to intensify. The changes in Mtowisa between 2000 and 2016 have been dramatic, and most of them are less than five years old. They are nothing, however, to those that are about to unfold over the next ten as this once remote village becomes increasingly integrated into the national economy.

This blog first appeared on the Long term livelihood CHange project here.

A move to a green economy requires changes in the way we make things, move, allocate resources, produce energy and consume stuff. It requires changes to our planning of cities, trade policy and budget allocations. It requires governments to do things differently and promote policies that encourage citizens, businesses and civil society to behave differently and have different aspirations. And that, these days, also entails some sort of measurements to tell whether or not the new policies are having the desired effects and creating the sort of change that a green economy requires.

There is currently a great deal of attention paid to the measures by which we know about our societies and global change. This is partly because the 169 targets set for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) all have an agreed set of (230) indicators for which governments now have to collect data to monitor their progress towards achieving those goals. It is partly because there is renewed criticism and interest in the accuracy and reliability of many of the measures currently used to assess the state of the world (not least GDP).

In this context, my contribution to the greenmentality project takes on two tasks:

First, I will examine the construction, robustness and meanings of indicators used to evaluate performance of those aspects of the SDGs which are relevant to assessing progress towards a ‘Green Economy’. I will do this by exploring the construction of national level statistics. This will entail interviews with the government officials who work on these statistics.

Second, I will explore what changes have been taking place in different parts of rural Tanzania. We know that there have been dramatic changes in the country in the last 20-30 years. It is less clear to what extent the changes, which have happened would be compatible with moves towards a ‘green economy’ and to what extent the proposed indicators might be able to capture them.

The SDG indicators and the green economy are not identical but they are related. In the first place some proponents of a green economy hold that their vision is part of the ‘pathways towards the sustainable development goals’ (according to UNEP). In the second there are organisations promoting green growth, which assemble readily available indicators as part of their endeavours in irrigation activity to plot progress towards a green economy. Finally, some of the indicators are plainly relevant to the condition and state of any green economy. These include measures of CO₂ production, use of fresh water, management of forests, and presence of forest cover and so on. This means that, as countries try to strengthen their statistical apparatus and surveillance capabilities, so they will be producing official ways of knowing about measures which will be taken as indicative of the strength (weakness) and presence (absence) of the green economy.

We know, however, that these measures can be flawed. Sometimes the indicators chosen are inappropriate (expanding protected areas for example can be inimical to local development). Extent of forest cover is not good for measuring the health of grassland systems. Alternatively, the problem can lie in the systems of state surveillance and monitoring, which are used to determine the condition of society and environment. The data used are sometimes inaccurate, flawed or misleading. It is an interesting and important exercise to consider what those weaknesses are, what misunderstandings they lead to and how well-known these problems are.

The purpose of the first part of this project therefore is to examine, through a study of the construction of SDG indicators, what view of the world is perpetrated by these statistics, and what errors can arise from them. This entails working with the people who produce and compile these statistics and with those who work in quality control and evaluation and those who use them. It entails exploring internal contradictions and complementaries within the data themselves. Outcomes may be that we shed doubt upon the value of these numbers, or, alternatively, that we need to move on from past criticisms about the invalidity of these statistics and recognize their fundamental reliability in core areas. This part of the project could entail some interesting collaborations with government officers who have been tasked with constructing strong and reliable statistical measures.

If the first part of the project is about accuracy, the second is about sensitivity. This element of the research project will build on current work in Tanzania, which is identifying places, which have seen transformations in their local economy (which may or may not have led to changes in local prosperity). This phase of the project explores in more detail the nature of and drivers of these changes and asks to what extent they are captured, and could be captured by current indicators of movement towards a green economy.

This will entail village level fieldwork interviewing key people whose lives and livelihoods have transformed or are meant to have been transformed by green economic measures. It will entail examining the reasons for and agents of change (networks, media, NGOs, government officers, companies selling new seeds etc.). It will entail exploring the local consequences of these transformations (inclusive growth, class formation etc.). It will entail considering on the basis of these data how ‘green’ these transformations have been. This part of the project will build on research projects, which are now completing and which have explored transformations in irrigation activity and in livelihood change and asset ownership in Tanzania.

Finally, having gleaned some understanding of the greenness of changes involved in place, which we know have been subject to forces of change, we can ask how sensitive current indicators of a green economy are to the changes we have observed. This part of the project could entail some interesting engagements with villagers’ own conceptions of the changes and transformations of their lives and what the consequences have been for them.

This blog first appeared on the Greenmentality site here.

The most recent issue of Environment & Society explores different practical, theoretical and conceptual problems associated with measuring and measurement across diverse environmental issues. In this blog we have reproduced the introduction to that collection, which is available on open access here. The arguments here should whet your appetite for more, and given some idea as to why this issue is so important.

The imperatives of measurement seem particularly prominent in today’s social environmental concerns. This is partly because of the problems different societies and international bodies have set themselves to solve. Whether these be the monitoring required to meet climate change targets or prevent biodiversity loss, the formulation of indicators to track progress to meet the targets set for the Sustainable Development Goals, concern about the return of high levels of inequality or crises in the validity of political polling, how we measure and monitor the world is increasingly on the agenda.

The prevalence of measurement is also partly due to the new possibilities and ways of knowing that are now being revealed through “big data” that track social media records, mobile phone use, and new abundances of machine-read satellite data. These data are themselves complicated constructs; they combine proxies, signals, indicators, and diverse interpretations and inferences. But this does not make them any less “factual”—after all, that is what fact has almost always constituted. The result is that many parts of the world look different now because we have new tools to see them with.

Measuring, monitoring, and counting have come to be close to the heart of research and academia. In Britain, academics’ research is evaluated periodically in national comparative procedures (now called the Research Excellence Framework), and their teaching is about to be also (the Teaching Excellence Framework). Metrics are increasingly likely to dominate these scorings (Wilsden et al. 2016). And independently of any official surveillance, many academics have a fairly good idea as to our citation scores and h-index. In some disciplines these will even be printed on the back of business cards. The fact that these measures can become such driving goals is a good measure (indicator if you prefer) of the social power of indicators.

Getting measurement right is important because it can become a means of spotting patterns and of holding powers to account. “Without measurement and standards, organizational agents operate under the tyranny of cronyism” (Power 2004: 774). But the means of seeing that measurement affords can also become ways of not seeing, of invisibilizing, of failing to recognize people, places and ways of knowing. As Paige West and colleagues (2006: 254) observed over a decade ago, with reference to a then newly comprehensive database of protected areas, new machines for measurement can become “a way of seeing the world with blindspots and blurred vision not easily perceived by its operators, but these blindspots become darker and fuzzier as the machine becomes better.” Michael Power (ibid) argues that when measurement becomes a means of comparing performance in organizations, “new secret organisational worlds” form that create and exploit invisibility in order to appear better in performance metrics.

More than that, we must understand measurement not just as a way of seeing but also as a creative and organizing project that co-produces the very world it aspires to describe. Theodore Porter (1994) is quite clear on this. Understanding measurement (this discipline is called metrology) is not just about how measurement describes society and nature. We have to understand how it reconfigures relations between and with them, and how it imposes and erases meaning. Understanding this is what metrology is all about. As Mark Cooper (2015: 1789) puts it: “[i]t invites us to question the social, political, and scientific conditions under which agreements about measurement and commensuration do or do not occur, and the consequences or effects of particular metrological systems.” Careful historical approaches are required to reconstruct how measurement came to be and what effects it has had (cf. Jacob 2001).

Measurement was integral to colonial and imperial projects. The quest to govern and the quest to measure and classify were intimately related (Freidberg 2007). Histories of the failures and dramas of colonial rule are replete with failed and violent attempts to create new categories of people or nature and ways for these newly identified categories to behave. Similarly, new forms of auditing and rule by standards are likened to new forms of neo-colonial endeavor.

But the transformations of measurement can also be experienced in subtler ways, and closer to home. Porter gives a useful example of the case of the US Corps of Engineers, which was instructed to ensure that the benefits of flood control schemes exceeded the costs. This sounds innocuous enough, except that the means by which costs and benefits were to be calculated was not explicated. Determining the costs and benefits of different proposed schemes then became the stuff of political battles between corporate interests and different branches of the state. More revealing still, when attempts to reconcile competing visions began, quantifying actual costs and benefits proved to be “startlingly elusive” (Porter 1994: 395). Even the agreed format for doing so that eventually came out was still added to and interpreted in idiosyncratic ways. Measurement could not contain the difference it was meant to arbitrate between.

The case illustrates a broader point. Measurement is not about describing the world. It requires building an apparatus that makes that description possible. As Porter (1994: 404) puts it:

‘To quantify a quality is not merely to solve an intellectual problem. It is to create what Latour calls a center of calculation, surrounded by a network of allies . . . The quantification of qualities is as much an administrative accomplishment as an intellectual one. And no matter what the skeptics may say, many social qualities have already been successfully quantified, in a variety of ways. Those who seek to do it differently, or to spread the net of quantified qualities still wider, need to consider not only epistemological questions but also moral and political ones. There is strength in numbers, and anyone who proposes to wield them more effectively must ask not only about their validity but also about how the world might be changed by adopting new forms of quantification.’

This way of thinking is clearly vital if we are to understand how markets govern, as Cooper (2015) has argued.

But measurement is not just conjured up through marshaling administrative support; it changes the world because, once established, it also entails altering practices to fit with, or respond to, the measurement. Porter gives the example of the US Forest Service, which had been instructed to cut no more trees than were being renewed through regrowth. Regrowth, however, can be boosted if fertilizers and new varieties of fast-growing tree are introduced—which means that more trees and larger trees can still be harvested (Porter 1994: 401). Indeed, the whole point of incentives offered by diverse forms of neoliberal conservation and environmental policy in the form of payment for environmental services is precisely to change the world by changing the behavior of (rational, profit maximizing) individuals. And some of the individuals can even become rational profit maximizers in the process.

The travesties and distortions required to see the world like a market or state can suggest that managing by counting is inherently flawed. But Power (Power 2004) argues that things are more complicated than that. The social processes that constitute measurement, and how people respond to measurement, create cycles of crisis and reform. He distinguishes between first- and second-order measurement, with the former establishing the classifications that make counting possible and the second combining counts into indices and composite indicators, which can forget the social origins and circumstances that produce them. This can result in multitudes of inappropriate numbers and strange uses of them. And this helps to drive the “cycles of reform” that characterizes measurement. According to Power (Power 2004: 778), the social and political responses to different sorts of (flawed numbers) are not about trust or distrust:

‘Dreams of measurement for control purposes are articulated; these are shown to be defective and/or leading to adverse unintended consequences; new measures and refinements are proposed. Any so-called trust in numbers is tempered by the general cultural acceptance of numbers in all aspects of modern society. Equally, specific episodes of distrust and critique lead to the reconstitution and revision of performance metrics, rather than their abandonment.’

Understanding measurement, therefore, is required to understand the societies demanding that measurement, and produced by it. That was the imperative behind this collection. The call for this volume posed a number of challenges. It asked authors to take on a variety of questions, including: How do we approach, measure, quantify, and qualify socio-environmental issues and phenomena? How does what we measure or the way we measure it affect what we know and how we act? How do particular types of, or approaches to, measurement become embedded in epistemic communities and with what consequences? What new things can we learn with new forms and techniques of measurement?

The response was rich, and the eight articles published here capture some of the diversity of interests and approaches. You can read more about what the authors argued and their different approaches in the rest of this open access introduction (start on page 3). In summary there are a number of abiding themes in this collection that are anticipated, and elucidated, in the metrological literature. The first is that measurement is an administrative achievement. The construction of indicators for market governance, community resilience, proxies of performance, heat, fish stocks, and much more requires complicated governing apparatuses and networks of state, private, and civil society interests. A second is that this has unexpected consequences –which perhaps itself should hardly be unexpected at all. The final point is that counting life, whether in societies or environments, is clearly problematic, if not also violent. It does not solve problems but creates a host of new ones.

But it does not follow from the last point that not counting becomes the solution to the problem. It may be a worse fate still not to appear on any register. The issue is not whether to appear, but on whose list, how, for what purpose, and in what circumstances. We cannot avoid measurement. As social beings, we count, calibrate, classify, and measure. How we see ourselves and others, and how we cohere, depends on such processes. It is difficult to imagine societies that do not do any of that. And it is precisely this inevitability and ubiquity of measurement that makes it so necessary to contest it more vigorously.

References

Cooper, Mark. H. 2015. “Measure for Measure? Commensuration, Commodification, and Metrology in Emissions Markets and Beyond.” Environment and Planning A 47: 1787–1804.

Freidberg, Susanne. 2007. “Supermarkets and Imperial Knowledge.” Cultural Geographies 14 (3): 321–342.

Jacob, Margaret C. 2001. “Factoring Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact.” History and Theory 40 (2): 280–289.

Porter, Theodore M. 1994. “Making Things Quantitative.” Science in Context 7 (3): 389–407.

Power, Michael. 2004. “Counting, Control and Calculation: Reflections on Measuring and Management.” Human Relations 57 (6): 765–783.

West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. 2006. “Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 251–277.

Wilsdon, James. 2015. The Metric Tide. The Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. London, Sage.

One of the hardest things to do as academic researchers is to conduct genuine interdisciplinary research that reaches across and engages with practitioners who are trying to put into practice things that you write about. This is especially true when studying conservation from a critical perspective.

There is a rich literature now on the social science of conservation, but we have, for different reasons not always found it particularly satisfactory. On the one hand, Peter Bille Larsen, working in both conservation and social anthropology, has long sought to bridge the gap between conservation anthropology from within with the growing body of critical scholarship on NGOs from the outside. On his part I, as a career social scientist, could spend a fair bit of time only writing about the social science of conservationists, for other social scientists, who would likely engage thoroughly and rewardingly with the whole enterprise. But the rather voluminous body of work resulting is unlikely to have much purchase on the conservation movement about which he writes. Social scientists can create echo chambers as well as anyone. But, ultimately being in such an echo chamber, is not particularly satisfactory.

In order to address these satisfactions we have recently published an edited collection The Anthropology of Conservation NGOs: rethinking the boundaries which brings together several years of thinking and writing about conservation practices. The book argues broadly for an anthropology of conservation NGOs, which moves beyond stereotypes of NGOs forms and action, on the one hand, and brings together multiple voices, on the other hand. It calls for more empirical study of conservation organizations as boundary organizations constantly expanding, or being challenged around, the boundaries of action through multiple forms of engagement with the state and market forces.

Structured around a series of chapters, written by scholars from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the book combines new articles with previously published papers. But, crucially, this collection is different from others in that it also includes a series of short essays in which different observers, academics and practitioners, reflect on these contributions. Commentators were given free reign to do so with no editorial control. It was, on other words, an attempt to create and nurture the dialogue and exchange of ideas that we were missing.

However, a book that is not read or discussed will hardly provoke much dialogue. It needs to be opened, challenged and disagreed with. The invitation from Bhaskar Vira, one of the contributors, to present the book in Cambridge was therefore welcome. We were privileged to launch this collection in the recently-completed David Attenborough Building which houses 10 different conservation NGOs, including the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute (which Bhaskar directs). It is a hive of conservation activity and thinking about conservation, and indeed an important space for dialogue. It would be difficult to find a better place to start the conversation we sought.

It was still rather daunting. When your own words about conservation NGOs which seemed perfectly right at the time of writing are read back to you in front of an audience of conservation NGO professionals, it necessarily prompts new questions and reflexive interrogation. Echo chambers suddenly seemed a good idea.

The three discussants who presented their thoughts about the book produced an effective mix of critique and engagement required for the engagement we sought. They paid a number of compliments to the collection, but we will not detain you with them (you can hear them on the podcast of the launch). In addition, they suggested a number of ways that this conversation could become more engaging.

Bill Adams (Cambridge University) took the lead by observing that conservation is a social phenomenon and so required the skills of social science and disciplines like anthropology to understand its decision making, beliefs and social consequences. He also observed that to be done really well this work required empathy – which he found rather lacking in this collection. His telling analogy was that Richard Dawkins (a British TV presenter famous for his atheism) could probably produce a wonderful documentary about the Catholic Church, but, while it would likely be incisive, it would be unlikely to help us understand why Catholics were Catholic. There is an intimacy to good social science which is not yet well demonstrated.

Jo Elliot (Flora and Fauna International) also welcomed the contribution of this book and its search for a constructive middle-ground. She argued that conservation NGOs have been doing effective social change for some time (in CAMPFIRE programmes, land titling exercises, and natural resource management schemes), which deserved more attention alongside revisiting the changing funding conditions of NGOs. Critiques need to recognise more of the achievements of existing work and engage much more with the specific kinds of social science questions prompted.

David Gibbons (RSPB), took issue with the language and conclusions of chapters emphasizing the emergence of neoliberalism in conservation. He could not recognise himself as the neoliberal operator that the parts of the book describes. Descriptions did not seem to capture the tasks with which he was faced on a daily basis. While at the same time he wanted to celebrate the funding successes of a growing conservation movement, its engagement with the private sector and use of market instruments to pursue conservation goals. He was missing the top ten ideas to make things better and called for more solutions from the social sciences.

These instructions to be more empathetic, better observers and to get better empirical data are all well taken. The call for more social science involvement in building conservation solutions is equally acknowledged. They imply, and this is particularly welcome, that the contribution of this collection is a step in the right direction because we need to do more of this work.

At the same time we recognise that this will be hard to do. Many are trying to, and have been for years. Bill Adams has been producing empathetic, well grounded, closely observed and engaged critiques since the start of his career. These are too numerous to list but selected books include Trade-offs in Conservation, Future Nature, Against Extinction and Transtion to Sustainability and there are many papers too. Likewise anthropologists like Peter Brosius and Paige West. The conversation in this sense may feel a bit like repetition for some of the protagonists, yet it is also clear that both conservation discourses and realities continue to prompt new questions not merely of a problem-solving nature, but equally so about the social, political and ecological effects of conservation NGO action. We can only really start grasping these complex realities in detail by working together, even if it may generate the occasional friction and disagreement. This is part of the condition of working across disciplines and professional boundaries.

We continually have to get used to each other, and repeat the experience of doing so until we are. On the 14th of December the debate continues in Geneva through the Geneva Environmental Network. Stay tuned.

This blog first appeared on the SIID site here.

A panel discussion of the book at the WWF and IUCN headquarters in Gland, Switzerland, is available here.

There is no getting away from it. NGOs make the conservation world go round. They do a lot of the best science, have some of the best fundraising ideas, and inspire new cadres of conservationists to join up. They have also done a good job at keeping social scientists in gainful employment, either in academia writing critiques, or, more recently in the organisations themselves responding to their academic colleagues.

There are two problems with all this attention however. First of all, and this is an old bug bear of mine, the literature seems to separate conservation NGOs and ‘development’ NGOs even though there is no real difference between them – and even though analyses of them draw almost identical conclusions. The second is the crudity of the categories at work. We seem to have just space for ‘BINGOs’ (Big International Non-Governmental Organisations) and all the rest, when in fact the scene is much more complicated than that. So, in a bid to get the taxonomy going, here is a list of NGO species that Katherine Scholfield and I observed in a large-scale survey of conservation NGOs operating in Africa.

As you can see the important thing with these classifications is to get the acronym right. In fact we have also identified a number of suitable acronyms for other categories, but are hesitant to name the NGOs they describe, or have been unable to find any to fit them. These include OH NGO! (the set of particularly silly NGOs); BROWN NGOs (the NGOs who will say anything to get approval); sOGNNGOs (just because it’s an unpronounceable palindrome); PINGOs the cold hearted callous NGOs; LINGO (non-Anglophone NGOs); SORRY I DON’T SPEAK THE LINGO (Anglophone NGOs); SONGs (Francophone and musical); WRONGs (Francophone, but misguided); TANGOs (pairs of NGOs moving in harmony, very rare); NGORONGORO (multiple use NGOs in northern Tanzania), and their neighbours over the border: NGONGs (a collection of Anglophone and Francophone brass pecussion NGOs focussing on conservation south of Nairobi).

More suggestions welcome.

This blog first appeared in Current Conservation here.