Check out a few existing works!
Residual Conservation
Ecosystem services are a flawed model for capturing the nuances of human-nature entanglements, but integrating them into trophic modeling still allows us to uncover broad-scale vulnerabilities to ecological change. Alongside researchers at CADIC-CONICET in Argentina, I performed a series of extinction simulations for eight ES integrated into a food web model for the Namuncurá-Burdwood Bank Marine Protected Areas I and II. This represents a first attempt to push the decisions made with respect to protected areas management to include the potential cascade effects of biodiversity loss on ecosystem service provision. For the first time in a marine ecosystem of this scale, we find that the robustness of the food web to species loss is highly correlated with ES's robustness to species loss.
For the past four decades, intercultural bilingual education (IBE) has been a common policy prescription to address Indigenous/non-Indigenous education gaps in Latin America. Initiatives have grown from small, localised pilots to national and state-level initiatives across thousands of schools. While there is some rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of IBE pilot initiatives at a small scale, there is very little evidence that expanding them to a larger scale benefits learners to the same extent. I and Andrew Morrison, my undergraduate professor and researcher at the Institute of Peruvian Studies, review the existing evidence on IBE’s effectiveness and identify a number of challenges in replicating success at scale. We identify factors which have limited our understanding of IBE’s effectiveness, as well as factors which may have contributed to less-than-ideal outcomes for larger programmes, including uneven coverage, varying teacher quality, and limited resource availability for smaller Indigenous languages. Addressing these issues will be crucial for improving IBE programmes’ ability to operate successfully at scale.
When conservation models are enacted in the Global South, is this simply a response to international norms? I argue that the inverse is true, that meaning for protected areas can be conceptualized and articulated from below. While Argentine marine protected areas (MPAs) protect a significant section of the country’s marine biodiversity, they focus predominantly on marine territories which are residual to the needs of extractive industry. I map the process of MPA creation in Argentina in two ways, first utilizing habitat suitability models (HSMs) to assess their effectiveness in protecting areas of ecological importance. Through a subsequent institutional analysis, I contend that this configuration of MPAs is the deliberate product of an effort to tie international standards of marine conservation to national issues of economic development, sovereignty, and scientific exploration. Argentina’s focus on so-called “residual protected areas” represents a novel political ecological model for understanding the reinterpretation of global environmental standards under the conditions of the global periphery. This case presents a model for foregrounding local agency and political realities in implementing international conservation policy, made possible by growing autonomy and authority within government agencies and local branches of international civil society networks.