Claire Bracegirdle

Participatory monitoring in Ghanaian community-based conservation

Supervisors: Professor Fiona Nunan and Dr Brock Bersaglio

Participatory environmental monitoring initiatives go hand-in-hand with community-based conservation. Often considered ‘best practice’ for their potential to generate locally-relevant data from the ground up in inclusive ways, they exist in contrast to top-down, expert-led approaches. However, despite their participatory nature, monitoring efforts are led by and focus on producing information for external partners, and little attention has been given to how they are re-shaped and re-imagined by local people in their implementation.

Claire explores these issues through collaboration with several community-based conservation initiatives in Ghana. In her ESRC-funded research, she examines how participatory monitoring initiatives are designed and how data is collected, used and shared, and to what extent the participatory monitoring initiatives reflect local peoples’ own priorities, ambitions and traditions of environmental monitoring

Profile

After graduating from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Claire worked for a number of international development and environment research organisations, including the Overseas Development Institute, the World Resources Institute and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Most recently, she worked with Forest Peoples Programme, supporting environmental and human rights defenders, and helping to produce the second edition of the Local Biodiversity Outlooks report.

Research Interests

Political ecology
Conservation
Critical institutionalism

Qualifications

BA English Literature and Philosophy (University of Auckland)
PGCert Social Research Methods (Birkbeck, University of London)
MSc Anthropology, Environment and Development (University College London)

Conference Papers

Groves and gold: Examining resistance to gold mining in Ghana’s Upper West. Royal Anthropological Institute: Anthropology and Conservation (October 2021), online
Participatory monitoring in local knowledge in Ghanaian community-based conservation. EASST-4S: Making and Doing Transformations (July 2024), Amsterdam
Rotten eggs, burnt eggs: learning from local systems of environmental monitoring. ASLE-UKI: Arts of Noticing, Attention and the Environment (September 2024), Edinburgh
Reimagining participatory monitoring: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and epistemic justice in Ghana. FLARE: Imagination and Innovation for Forests and Livelihoods (October 2024), Rome

Contact Details

Email: cxb080@student.bham.ac.uk

Twitter: @c_bracegirdle