Framing Knowledge Legitimacy in Conservation Disputes

The effective implementation of conservation policies requires the support and compliance of indigenous communities. Yet, despite individual successes, the history of conservation is characterised by alienation and opposition (Duffy 2010; Jacoby 2001). Within the literature, the root causes of conservation disputes are understood in terms of stakeholder dichotomies along axes of values, knowledge, and power. Principally, the epistemic authority of supranational scientific policy-makers to define the cultural, scientific and legal parameters of conservation is set against the weak social position of indigenous land-users and their traditional knowledge of social-ecological practices (Holmes 2007; Moran & Rau 2014; Sleeth-Kelper et al 2015). Focusing on Ireland’s failure to implement an EU Habitats Directive on peatlands conservation, this study concurs with the literature regarding the imbalance of power in policy making. However, we argue that once a supranational policy has been adopted, indigenous land-users are better placed than distant scientific policy-makers to influence the public agenda by engaging in “diversionary re-framing” (Freudenburg & Gramling 1994). Diversionary reframing is successful, in part, because it complements the news media norms of newsworthiness (Cox 2013) and adversarial framing (Knight & Greenberg 2011). In the process, indigenous knowledge claims become politicised at local and national levels while scientific knowledge claims are relegated from public debate. To counter-act the inequity between stakeholders at the level of public-agenda setting, we suggest that conservationist policy-making needs to be complemented with a long-term communication strategy that is capable of responding to issues that arise at local and national levels prior to the media politicization of the issue. Such a communication strategy, we argue, is fundamental to the broader effort to support “environmental problem solving” (Millar 2013) and the development of ethical environmental communication (Cox 2013).