Offices of The Nature Conservancy’s Amazon Conservation Program in Belém, Pará in 2018. Photo by Gregory Thaler.
Ethnography provides essential insights for understanding environmental governance, helping to illuminate the everyday practices and rationalities of environmental regulation and decision-making. In a new article published in Geoforum, BNRGI co-director Prof. Gregory Thaler discusses three methodological approaches for ethnography of environmental governance: place-based ethnography, institutional ethnography, and organizational ethnography. These approaches are distinguished by how they define the ‘field’ where the ethnographer works, and each approach implies a different set of research practices and enables different kinds of insights into environmental governance.
Organizational ethnography is a particularly promising research strategy, since it can provide a unique perspective on the internal workings of powerful actors in environmental politics. Prof. Thaler draws on his experience conducting a transnational organizational ethnography of the tropical forest conservation programs of The Nature Conservancy, an environmental non-governmental organization, to illustrate practicalities, pitfalls, and benefits of an organizational approach. His research reveals how transformations in the NGO sector related to internationalization, financial shifts, and scientific debates have helped drive the rise of market-based environmental policy and ‘sustainable development’ discourse in global environmental governance.
Ethnographic methods have been a focus of recent discussion within BNRGI, and this new publication contributes to the continued refinement of our understanding of the role of ethnography for studying, informing, and contesting environmental governance.
Reference:
Thaler, Gregory M. (2021) “Ethnography of Environmental Governance: Towards an Organizational Approach.” Geoforum 120: 122-131.