Journal
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
Volume 7, Issue 4, Pages 539-558Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/14649360600825687
Keywords
biodiversity; environmental governance; practice; non-human agency
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Funding
- Economic and Social Research Council [PTA-026-27-0905] Funding Source: researchfish
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Since their inception in 1980 the concept of biodiversity and the practical techniques of biodiversity conservation have experienced a meteoric rise in popularity as a mode of understanding and governing the environment. This paper draws on concepts from science studies and posthumanist geography to outline a new approach to biodiversity. In contrast to the objective, disembodied and panoptic definition offered in the official documentation, it explores what biodiversity comes to mean in practice in a UK context. It argues that biodiversity must be understood as the discursive and material outcome of a socio-material assemblage of people, practices, technologies and other non-humans. It then applies this understanding to examine the scope of the assemblage that performs UK biodiversity conservation. In so doing it maps a set of taxonomic divisions. Drawing on empirical fieldwork, it examines one particular arena within this assemblage-species surveillance-and identifies the importance of the detectability of a species and taxonomic divisions in resources for accounting for these partialities. In conclusion, it reflects upon the benefits of this new approach for understanding biodiversity and biodiversity conservation.
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