Justice-oriented Participatory Design of Conservation Technologies

Ecoacoustics is playing an increasingly important role in biodiversity conservation and has a long history of engaging with and being supported by citizen scientists. Yet, as with other conservation technologies, existing approaches to deployment and design can limit participation, perpetuate coloniality and exclusion, and weaken conservation implementation, particularly in the tropics where biodiversity monitoring has become increasingly urgent and where potential research participants are deeply connected to and dependent on the ecosystems being monitored. Through empirical collaborative research with a forest community in Ghana, this dissertation investigates the sociotechnical implications and design opportunities that emerge from participatory ecoacoustic research with marginalised communities, with the aim of developing methods for the justice-oriented design and deployment of conservation technologies. This thesis begins with a review of the often disconnected but intersecting literature on Conservation Data Justice and Participatory Design, which informs participatory research with conservation technologies, such as ecoacoustics, and outlines the current gaps and limitations. This synthesis is followed by an overview of the research design that underpins the four distinct but thematically connected empirical design and deployment engagements and investigations conducted in collaboration with a forest community in the Asante region of Ghana, detailed in the primary chapters of this work. Through these engagements emerge four key contributions to the fields of HCI and Conservation: (1) an original approach to trust-building and consent in participatory ecoacoustic monitoring that attends to the political and justice implications of conservation technologies, (2) an original method of culturally situated Justice-oriented Design Listening, (3) a novel co-designed tool for the interactive visualisation and exploration of ecoacoustic data alongside a set of design lessons for justice-oriented interface design and finally, (4) the conceptualisation conservation data work as a livelihood intervention for local forest communities. I conclude by presenting the core contribution of this thesis, an emergent conceptual framework for the Justice-oriented Participatory Design of Conservation Technologies. This integrated framework synthesises the learnings and contributions from each chapter, foregrounding their implications for the wider literature concerning conservation technology design and deployment for scholars and practitioners working across conservation, Participatory Design and HCI.