Mapping the patriarchy in conservation

In common with a great many practitioners and academics working in conservation, we are gripped by the gap between the scale of the nature crisis¹ and the effectiveness of current approaches to halting and reversing this. We know that many others working in conservation also share our conviction that any proportionate response to the nature crisis requires engagement with its underlying drivers. For so long as this engagement is postponed, the crisis will worsen – notwithstanding isolated stories of success.

Capitalism, colonialism, and militarism have long been identified as core structural forces that exacerbate the nature crisis and undermine conservation effectiveness^2,3. With this article, however, we are seeking to provoke debate on another factor that works to frustrate action on the nature crisis: patriarchy.

For the purposes of this article, we define patriarchy as the nexus of social, political, and economic processes, norms, and structures that produce and sustain male supremacy, male authority, and gender inequality. Patriarchy ensures that benefits of power and privilege (social, cultural, and material) flow primarily to men. People of other genders may participate in patriarchy and benefit directly from it; but always precariously so^4,5.

Patriarchal privilege is intersectionally operationalized by its ‘cronies’ – colonialism, capitalism, and militarism. A substantial corpus of feminist work explicates the ways in which patriarchy drives, amplifies, and is reciprocally amplified by these intertwined systems and the multiple forms of oppression that they perpetuate^5,6.

Feminist scholarship also presses the case that patriarchy privileges certain types of masculinity: paramount among patriarchally preferred masculinities is those that erase emotional connection, suppress empathy, promote detachment, and prime men for violence⁷.

Patriarchy normalizes the objectification and instrumentalization of nature, thereby facilitating its exploitation and destruction.

Until focused attention is paid to the ways in which patriarchal norms are manifest in conservation programmes, and the ways in which mainstream conservation practices serve to deepen and perpetuate these norms, it is difficult to foresee that proportionate responses to the nature crisis are possible.

Further, we do not believe that conservation programmes can lay credible claims to centering women’s empowerment – a claim that many programmes now make – until they begin to recognize and challenge the masculinist assumptions underlying their work. Our analyses draw on foundational feminist environmental and political ecology scholarship^8,9,10 and new work on the materialist feminist/posthuman turn^11,12. Such work has sharpened our analysis of patriarchal structures and their effects in the realm of conservation.

What then is ‘patriarchal conservation’? Our goal with this article is to offer brief examples of some ways in which patriarchy presents structural challenges to making conservation more effective. Our list, which is far from exhaustive, comprises: the precarious position of women within conservation practice (Working Conditions for Women in Conservation); treatment of animals (Violence against animals); knowledge production (Science and knowledge production); militarization (Securitization and militarization of conservation enforcement) and monetization (The monetary valuation of nature). These examples are amongst the most pressing, in our view, and are under active discussion in the field. In considering each of these examples we also – crucially – point to some of the many ways in which mainstream conservation approaches themselves further embed patriarchal thinking. This has an iatrogenic effect: it helps to entrench an orientation toward nature which itself lies at the heart of the nature crisis and which frustrates the effectiveness of most mainstream conservation efforts.

In seeking to provoke wider debate on the ways in which patriarchy and conservation practice intersect, our intention is to suggest pathways towards conservation responses that are both more just and more proportionate to the scale of the nature crisis.

Working conditions for women in conservation

The hegemonic masculinities that predominate in much conservation practice serve to marginalize and oppress people who do not conform to these norms. Our focus here is on the experience of women in “professional” conservation work. However, given the hegemonic nature of patriarchal privilege, similar arguments could also be advanced in the cases of people who do not conform to gender norms, and racially minoritized people.

Women – whether working as rangers, laboratory scientists, volunteers or conservation organization professionals – encounter discrimination and often violence. Violence, and the threat of violence, is both a symptom of gender inequality and a tool used to reinforce it^{13,14,15,16,17,18}. The exclusion and hostility experienced by women in the conservation field are common across many other professions, especially in the sciences¹⁹, but may be amplified by conservation’s history of top-down control and militarization.

Women who work for conservation organizations often experience hostility. Research on the experience of women in leadership positions in conservation organizations is scant. A recent study of working conditions for women in conservation revealed multidimensional discrimination, including, for example, salary inequality, harassment, and several different forms of exclusion²⁰. Yet these problems often go unnoticed by male colleagues. Another recent study of a large global US-based conservation organization found that men reported the sector as a more equitable and favorable place for women than women themselves experienced²¹.

Women’s experience working for conservation organizations parallels their experience in conservation-related academia. Women in conservation science are acknowledged less for their work than their male peers²²; university conservation biology departments are mostly male²³; and peer-reviewed literature is dominated by men from the global north²⁴. For women undertaking field research, who often work in geographically remote spaces, the threat of violence is omnipresent^16,17.

Further to such evidence of discrimination, we observe that while there is considerable appetite for ‘including women’ in conservation, this rarely extends to challenging or dismantling patriarchal norms and structures²⁵. Women facing these structural barriers have little maneuvering space between being isolated and marginalized, or being co-opted into discriminatory structures in ways that risk them being seen as lending tacit support to these structures.

Violence against animals

Practices of violence, discrimination, and oppression, as targeted at different groups of human and non-human animals, are closely entangled^26,27,28. Male violence towards both minoritized humans and non-human animals arises from the subordination of these groups to heteronormative masculinities.

Conservation effort is usually focused at the population and species level. It is often disinterested in the wellbeing or suffering of individuals²⁹ and privileges the protection of native species above introduced species. These priorities lead to violence towards animals, such as, for example, the mass killing of ‘invasive’ species (see below). The pursuit of conservation goals focused at the ecosystem or species level, in conjunction with relative indifference to the wellbeing of the individual animals impacted by conservation programs, creates a situation in which violence towards animals is seen as both necessary and acceptable.

Violent conservation practice is often pursued in the context of wider discourse which suppresses and diminishes the legitimacy of emotional responses, while elevating reason. Alongside feminist scholarship, feminist animal ethics has also criticized dualistic thinking which subordinates emotions to reason – while ascribing emotions to the ‘female’ and reason to the ‘male’ realm³⁰. Such dualism is not justified by a current psychological understanding of how decisions are made.

The illusion that emotion can be excised from decision-making processes is sustained, despite the evidence, by patriarchal thinking which denigrates emotion and valorizes reason. Unfortunately, this illusion contributes to the suppression of compelling ethical arguments against the harmful treatment of animals.

Many kinds of conservation practice entail the violent treatment of animals, although compassionate conservationists have recently called for a change in mindsets and practices^31,32,33. Here we consider three examples of such violence: mass killing of introduced species; trophy hunting; and culling indigenous species as an ecological management practice.

Programs to kill introduced species often proceed with apparent disregard for the suffering of individual animals and dismiss those who raise concerns about animal welfare as being unduly influenced by their emotions. Violence is built into programs to eradicate introduced species and such programs often deploy linguistic frames that serve – deliberately or otherwise – to embed violence (and, indeed, an emotional commitment to violence) as part of the vocabulary of conservation. For example, framing introduced species as ‘invasive’ conveys an implicit understanding that these are hostile invaders that must be defeated, helping to legitimize militarized responses and normalize violence as a banal and unexamined aspect of conservation practice (cf. Securitization and militarization of conservation enforcement).

Trophy hunting violates an animal’s life, causing pain and suffering and embedding an understanding that the animals involved are a commodity to be valued solely in terms of the fee that people – usually men – will pay to kill them. Consideration of trophy hunting is complicated by colonial, post-colonial, and global inequalities: some of the loudest voices against trophy hunting are people from the global north who might be seen once again trying to tell people in the global south how to manage biodiversity in their own countries, while at the same time, it is also people from the global north who are the primary hunters. The throughline is that trophy hunting relies on norms of masculinity rooted in violence and domination, and suppression of empathy for animals that suffer in the process. This domination, and by extension the form of masculinity that underpins it, is celebrated in the ‘trophy’: in photographs of the hunter astride the animal (his weapon in hand) and in the preserved body parts that are subsequently displayed in the hunter’s home.

Many indigenous species are managed by humans to control the demographic structure and dynamics of the population – for example, where natural predators have been driven to extinction. Conservationists differ widely on the acceptable level of intervention^34,35, and such interventions are sometimes motivated by animal welfare concerns. But unless care is exercised, these approaches also risk reinforcing a perception of “legitimate dominion”, consolidating a masculinist urge to exert control and mastery over nature and animals and normalizing violence as an acceptable and unremarkable means to achieve this.

Conservation would benefit from acknowledging that animals count morally; that violence should be viewed as a last resort rather than as something to be normalized³¹; and that compassionate and empathetic responses are both necessary and legitimate^30,36. But bringing compassion and empathy to conservation debates must not be seen as “women’s work”. We look forward to the dismantling of hegemonic understandings of masculinity, such that male conservationists are better equipped to experience and validate these emotions, and better supported in bringing these to their work.

Science and knowledge production

Feminist thinkers have noted a long historical association between hegemonic masculinities, the scientific method, and the denigration and erasure of other ways-of-knowing^37,38,39,40. This cannot be disentangled from analyses of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. There is a need for an intersectional analysis, recognizing that privileged forms of knowledge production and ways-of-knowing are biased towards Western scientific perspectives and prioritize white Western scientists and institutions⁴¹. We highlighted in the previous section how this gendered commitment to some ways-of-knowing may underpin the relative indifference of many conservation programs to the suffering of individual animals. In this section, we further suggest that this same prioritization of Western scientific methodology operates to marginalize both local and Indigenous knowledge and research methods rooted in the social sciences and humanities, such as ethnography and storytelling. This has, negative impacts on the effectiveness of conservation work while undermining plural ontologies.

Indeed, since the 1990s, conservation scholarship has recognized the importance of local and indigenous knowledge and community participation as a cornerstone for achieving conservation targets. This is now reflected in deliberations by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Concretely, the collective rights of indigenous peoples on lands and territories were recently incorporated in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. These bodies have come to recognize the intergenerational knowledge and worldviews of indigenous and local communities (ILCs). Lands managed by ILCs often have equal or higher biodiversity than in protected areas⁴². There is a growing impetus to involve ILCs, which play an essential role in conserving biodiversity, in decision-making processes within the IPBES assessments⁴³.

Yet while such progress has been made at a policy level, expansion of protected areas on the ground continues to lead to the displacement of ILCs. Alienation of Indigenous communities from lands that they value, shape and protect, while disregarding their knowledge in day-to-day conservation practice, is hastening the demise of ecological systems⁴⁴.

Securitization and militarization of conservation enforcement

In many parts of the world – particularly sub-Saharan Africa – enforcement and protection practices in conservation are rapidly becoming securitized and, more specifically, militarized^45,46. Critical examination of these processes by analysts such as Duffy, Masse, and Lunstrum^{15,47,48,49,50}, among others, have mapped out many of the processes and the problems associated with these conservation trends, such as militarized conservation creates fear and alienation in communities subjected to it, damaging the ability to build common conservation purpose; securitization often relies on widespread arrests and incarceration of suspected poachers, mostly men, thus producing new cohorts of female-headed households facing economic precarity; militarized on-the-ground operations usually catch only the local (presumed) poachers, while leaving the big actors, including international wildlife trafficking cartels, in place. Meanwhile, arms manufacturers and security companies have vested interests in conservation securitization, helping arms manufacturers to ‘greenwash’ their business models. Securitization is often the basis for a new form of ‘green-grabbing,’ aligned with neoliberal agendas and leveraged to produce capital accumulation and dispossession⁵¹.

Militarism is closely twinned with patriarchy⁵². Willingness to adopt militarized conservation is a direct effect of the embedded ‘ordinary’ maleness both of conservation and of wildlife crime. Militarism is a product of, and in turn, amplifies, already-present masculinized tropes of ‘heroic’ conservation; the not-infrequent representation of international wildlife trade as a ‘war,’ including tropes of species ‘invasions’ (cf. Violence against animals), accelerates this dynamic. Armed conservation accelerates and spreads the risk of violence. Although little studied, growing evidence links the escalation of domestic gender-based violence and community violence with conservation militarization^15,16.

This securitization is accompanied by increased reliance upon surveillance technologies, many of which are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). While the goals of conservation surveillance projects and the companies that produce the necessary technologies are often justified (to gather data and protect animals), negative socio-ecological impacts are frequently overlooked and can lead to harmful consequences⁵³. For example, the deployment of AI-enabled surveillance technologies – which inevitably surveil people as well as animals – may undermine rights to privacy, and these impacts are often greatest for women (ibid.: 7). Furthermore, these technologies are mainly aligned with Western values⁵⁴, and developed by Western companies. A critical discussion of these securitization patterns and the growing reliance on Western-centered conservation-AI needs to take place in the sciences and humanities, between policymakers, in public forums, and within conservation organizations.

We welcome recent, though as yet still modest, shifts in mainstream conservation paradigms away from highly militarized and securitized approaches. Important global assessments and agreements such as the CBD and IPBES importantly provide counterweights to militarism, focusing on the mutual interests of people and nature⁵⁵.

The monetary valuation of nature

Over the last few decades many businesses, and governmental- and non-governmental- organizations have advocated the monetary valuation of nature, often in the context of valuing ecosystem services.

Recent examples include an estimate, promoted by the International Monetary Fund that “the average” great whale has a value of “more than $2 m”, and that the carbon sequestration “services” of whales, were these to return to pre-whaling population sizes, “would be worth about $13 a person a year”⁵⁶; the World Bank recently press-released its assessment that the Amazon rainforest is worth “at least” $317bn per year⁵⁷.

At least ostensibly, the monetary valuation of nature is promoted in the expectation that audiences who are unmoved by other imperatives for biodiversity conservation – perhaps, for example, because of a presumed lack of emotional response (cf. Science and knowledge production) – will be persuaded by an approach which makes visible the economic value of nature. Widespread enthusiasm for this approach has not been dampened by growing evidence of its failure to support the conservation outcomes anticipated by its proponents. This has led some to ask why such valuations are still promoted so enthusiastically when they appear to be of such limited help in conservation practice⁵⁸.

In inception, monetary valuation was an approach empowered by patriarchal norms: instrumentalization of ‘the other’; erasure of emotional connection; and the replacement of relationship with the notion of utility. However, patriarchal norms are also rehearsed and strengthened by this very discourse. To the extent that it has percolated public consciousness, aided by well-resourced communication campaigns, the monetary valuation of nature is further embedding patriarchal norms. In this way, attempts to address the nature crisis by placing a monetary value on nature privileges and entrenches some of the very mindsets and structures that are driving the crisis.

Many conservationists recognize the failures of the monetary valuation of nature in terms of concrete conservation outcomes. Some also recognize the contradictions of responding to the nature crisis by foregrounding values that have driven this crisis in the first place^59,60,61.

Yet conservation practitioners often feel unable to dissent from these frameworks and the patriarchal mindsets that underlie them, for fear of their work being seen as lacking political and economic realism, thus risking them becoming sidelined or censured.

Patriarchal norms thus operate as a defensive cordon, safeguarding the monetization of nature from critical examination. Dissent is dismissed as ‘emotional’ (cf. Science and knowledge production) or oblivious to the ‘realities’ of how political and economic decision-making is conducted. Revealing these misleading norms could help conservationists recognize the wider impacts of such practices.

Current approaches to the natural crisis are not adequate to the scale of challenge. In this perspective piece, we highlight some of the many ways in which patriarchal thinking has helped to create and is now exacerbating this situation. We have argued that such thinking has three effects: first, patriarchal norms often compromise the short-term effectiveness of specific conservation programs; second, at a more systemic level, rehearsing and further embedding patriarchal values and norms, will serve to further postpone the transformative changes necessary to adequately address the nature crisis; third, where patriarchal norms become embedded in conservation practice, this can further reinforce and perpetuate existing marginalization of minoritized groups.

We have also highlighted the need to use an intersectional analysis, declining to view women as a homogeneous category in conservation planning and target setting. This will be essential in any attempt to redress historical forms of injustice based on race, sexuality, caste, class, religion, or disability⁴¹.

We hope that this article will help to prompt wider reflection on the intersections of patriarchy and conservation and that it will help to energize people working in mainstream conservation to reflect on their own, and their organizations, approaches. Many people – both academics and practitioners – are working to erode the dominance of patriarchal mindsets in conservation, although they may not choose to characterize their work in this way. We hope that drawing attention to the wider imperative to dismantle patriarchal approaches in conservation will foster deeper awareness of shared purpose across these diverse initiatives, and help to establish new areas of common ground and mutual support.