




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 3 (2): 27–31, July 2020 

 
COMMENTARY 
 

A Call to Redefine ‘the Field’ in Nature Conservation 
Studies in India  
 

Madhuri Ramesh   
 
1. INTRODUCTION  

Nature conservation has undergone significant shifts since the early 2000s. 
To begin with, the International Union for Conservation of Nature 
(IUCN), the arm of the United Nations that steers the global conservation 
agenda, has become an increasingly neoliberal institution—it has 
marginalized concerns regarding the impacts of capitalism and, instead, has 
promoted market-based tools for conservation and sought partnerships 
with a range of industries including mining corporations (MacDonald 
2010). A second change is that in some parts of the world, there is 
militarized management of protected areas (PAs). The default assumption 
of the states/organizations involved is that poachers are linked to terrorist 
or drug-trafficking networks and thereby pose a major security threat 
(Duffy 2014). Similarly, some states favour the establishment of vast PAs as 
an assertion of geopolitical power. This is commonly seen in the case of 
marine protected areas (MPAs), which have a history of territorial dispute. 
Such MPAs may continue to be accessed or managed by military 
establishments (De Santo 2020). Finally, and in contrast to these top–down 
trends, there has been a surge in calls over the past few years to decolonize 
conservation by directly challenging the Global North‘s fundamentally 
unjust and racist approach (Mbaria and Ogada 2016; Aini and West 2018). 
These threads extend to India, too, as recent studies indicate that nature 
conservation here is closely linked to issues of neoliberalism (Ramesh and 
Rai 2017), national security (Muralidharan and Rai 2020), and social 

                                                        
 Azim Premji University, PES Campus, Hosur Road, Electronic City, Bengaluru, Karnataka 
560100, India; madhuri.ramesh@apu.edu.in. 

Copyright © Ramesh 2020. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.123  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v3i2.123


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [28] 

discrimination (Kabra 2019). Now more than ever, nature conservation is 
not just about saving biodiversity—it is a domain marked by economic, 
political, and social contestation.  

These realities raise an important question with respect to conservation 
research: what exactly do we mean by ‗the field‘ today? Where do its 
boundaries lie? Although we tend to treat this concept as self-evident, I 
propose here that we first need to acknowledge that the field is a 
constructed notion; second, recognizing the politics integral to its 
construction can help us redefine its boundaries in more progressive ways. I 
draw parallels between conservation science and anthropology because the 
latter began with a similarly narrow view of the field but has radically 
evolved over a few decades. 

 

2. EARLY CONNECTIONS 

Anthropology has much in common with nature conservation with respect 
to the idea that doing research in ‗the field‘ is an integral part of the 
disciplinary identity. This is because around the late 1800s, anthropologists 
borrowed heavily from natural scientists who practised their craft 
outdoors—the latter chose a limited and distant area (the field) within 
which they carried out intensive, systematic, and direct observations 
(fieldwork). Therefore, similar to primatologists of that period who studied 
animal communities in their ‗pristine‘ state, anthropologists took a 
naturalistic, albeit racist, approach to studying so-called primitive human 
communities in their ‗native‘ states. The anthropology of this period was 
simply an extension of natural history. However, by the late 1900s, 
anthropology underwent a metamorphosis. For example, it dispensed with 
the reductionist nature–culture dichotomy; became sensitive to how power 
relations between researchers and the researched influenced the production 
of knowledge; and revised the traditional idea of ‗the field‘ (as a culturally 
exotic and geographically distant place) to bring more European places, 
institutions, and communities under its analytical gaze. It even examined 
how institutional structures and funding trends a priori disqualified the 
work of most researchers from being recognized as ‗rigorous‘ because to 
meet this yardstick, one had to have the social capital of an athletic, white, 
middle-class male, or equivalent (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). 

 

 

 



[29] Madhuri Ramesh 

3. THE INDIAN SITUATION 

Most conservation researchers in India appear to follow the orthodox 
standards of the nineteenth century. As one scientist said, for many of us, 
―nature is simply where culture is not‖.1 Therefore, we still maintain what 
Gupta and Ferguson (1997) describe as ―a hierarchy of purity‖ with respect 
to field sites: research carried out in human-inhabited areas of any kind—
industrial or non-industrial—is not valued as much as research conducted 
in ‗wild‘ sites. For many of us conservation scientists, ‗real fieldwork‘ still 
involves spending long periods of time in a site that is as notable for the 
presence of flora or fauna as for the absence of any (obvious) human 
activity. If we cannot readily find such sites in today‘s world, we engage in 
discursive erasure: we describe them in our studies as though they were 
uninhabited or disconnected from modernity. But how relevant and ethical 
is such an understanding and treatment of the field, given the current 
changes occurring in the domain of conservation?  

I argue here that this traditional concept of the field is not an innocent one; 
it comes laden with colonial baggage and contributes to the social injustices 
perpetrated by hard-line conservation models. This is because such a 
narrow delimitation of the field as pristine nature confines the researcher‘s 
gaze to the proximate causes of degradation and perpetuates the ‗traditional‘ 
conservation narrative that local communities and practices pose the single 
greatest threat to nature. It forecloses the possibility of tracing the drain and 
damage caused by urbanization, industrialization, and elite ways of life, as 
these remain outside the boundaries of the field (as it is usually defined) 
and, therefore, are closed to academic scrutiny. This and the absence of 
reflexive writing in the natural sciences (which dominate conservation 
research in India) mean that as an academic community, we have little 
understanding of how our gender, caste, class, linguistic ability, etc. might 
influence our access to the field and, in the process, either limit or facilitate 
the production of conservation knowledge in the Indian context. Even our 
popular articles often unthinkingly reproduce the colonial ‗green hero‘ tone 
of narration and shed little light on lived experiences and dilemmas 
associated with doing fieldwork. 

 

 

 

                                                        
1  Kartik Shanker, 2013. He made this comment as a general observation and not as a 
statement of his own position. 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [30] 

4. RECHARTING THE FIELD 

Recognizing these pitfalls of typical conservation studies, some researchers 
look for ways ―to add a social component‖. However, with this we run the 
risk of tokenism and, worse, we find that our analytical frame continues to 
be impoverished. This is one reason why we still publish far more studies 
on the damaging effects of firewood, grazing, and non-timber forest 
produce (NTFP) collection in India than we do on mining, luxury tourism, 
or misguided corporate social responsibility projects. A second reason is 
that the neoliberal orientation of the IUCN and other major conservation 
organizations limits the funding available to certain types of studies (a 
detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this article). Nevertheless, I 
suggest that to make any significant change to the status quo, we need to 
need to take a leaf from the contemporary anthropologist‘s book and revise 
our ideas of the field. We need to accept it as a multidimensional, socially 
constructed space that has biodiversity, history, politics, culture, etc. Even if 
our focus is on the former, we could at least acknowledge the existence of 
these other dimensions in our descriptions of study areas.  

Fortunately, we do have some conservation studies in India that show us 
how an expansive notion of the field can enrich our efforts; for example, 
the well-known ―Report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel‖ 
(Gadgil 2011) delves into the key ecological, economic, and social factors 
that make this a composite social-ecological landscape. It critiques the effect 
of ―conservation by exclusion‖ coupled with ―development by exclusion‖ 
and, instead, advocates an adaptive co-management approach for biodiverse 
areas, i.e., an approach that recognizes the existence and rights of people in 
―wilderness‖ areas as well as the value of incremental, experiential learning 
in conservation practice (Berkes and Turner 2006). Other examples, albeit 
on a limited scale, include conservation projects for turtles (Sharma 2006), 
elephants (Evanescence Studios 2014), and leopards (Ghosal and Kjosavik 
2015). 

It is only with such efforts that we can begin to truly do justice to the 
complexities of undertaking conservation, particularly in the Global South. 
Our training institutions also need to incorporate insights that the 
conservation community has acquired from hard-earned experience; for 
instance, a working knowledge of the stratifications in Indian society, 
regional economies, and struggles around environmental justice would 
certainly give fresh researchers a sharper sense of reality and a more ethical 
orientation, which would preclude the need for them to reinvent the wheel 
with each study. We need to develop a more realistic sense of ‗the field‘ 
individually and institutionally so that we can chart a progressive vision for 
nature conservation in India.  



[31] Madhuri Ramesh 

REFERENCES 

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Berkes, Fikret and Nancy J. Turner. 2006. ―Knowledge, Learning and the 
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De Santo, Elizabeth M. 2020. ―Militarized Marine Protected Areas in Overseas 
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