Biological Conservation | 2021
Communities behind the lens: A review and critical analysis of Visual Participatory Methods in biodiversity conservation
Abstract
Abstract Social considerations lie at the core of conservation challenges and are increasingly motivating researchers to seek methodological approaches that illuminate these social aspects in nuanced and actionable ways. Thus, theoretical approaches and methods from social science fields such as public health, education, and environmental justice may offer productive insights for the conservation endeavor. One approach long-used in these fields are Visual Participatory Methods (VPMs), which incorporate community-generated images as data. VPMs emphasize community perspectives by coalescing and representing data in ways that are authentic to and embedded in local context while facilitating flexibility in the research toolkit. Yet conservation research has underused VPMs, specifically with regard to people-centered approaches, which VPMs have the potential to help evolve beyond standing critiques toward more inclusive, equitable, and productive formulations. To understand how conservation researchers have employed VPMs to date—including key goals, findings, and outcomes—we conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature. Through this process, our final sample identified 24 conservation-research studies that employed VPMs. Our review findings suggest that employing VPMs can lead to tangible conservation outcomes, and that they are useful to researchers across several dimensions: (1) understanding how residents current perceptions of their social-ecological system have evolved over time, and how historical events have shaped them; (2) revealing residents current perceptions of their surrounding environment, how they situate themselves within it, and how their values and worldviews may align or conflict with those of interacting institutions; and (3) uncovering potential avenues for reconciling those differences.