Institutional ethnography: Uncovering the ruling relations of the conservation sector in Canada

Introduction 

For almost five years, I have had the honour of managing the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), an Indigenous-led SSHRC Partnership Grant that aims to 1) support the transformation of nature conservation in Canada, and support Indigenous Nations and governments with the development and implementation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs). As a network, we bring together a diverse range of partners including Indigenous leaders, environmental conservation organizations, academic institutions, scholars and researchers who are committed to acting on and building from the recommendations set out by the Indigenous Circle of Expert’s report We Rise Together.   

At this intersection of environmental and social justice, there is no shortage of interesting and important questions that could frame my doctoral project. It is no secret that environmentalism, and by extension conservation, is a white, settler movement (Curnow & Helferty, 2018; Scott, 2023). Mainstream conservation is part of Canada’s settler-colonial past and present, contributing to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their territories; disrupted Indigenous governance, legal orders, and complex relational systems; and privileged positivist scientific knowledge (Carroll, 2014; Moola & Roth, 2019). In addition to these social injustices, conservation is ineffective at providing positive ecological outcomes – it is now indisputable that we are living through the dual mass extinction and climate crises. However, there is increased recognition among scholars and conservation practitioners of the efficacy of Indigenous approaches to caring for lands and waters. An often-quoted statistic shows that while Indigenous peoples comprise about 6% of the world’s population, Indigenous territories account for 80% of the world’s biodiversity (Garnett, et al., 2019). We are in a moment of shift with the potential for transforming the conservation sector.  

Changing tides 

In March, 2018, the Indigenous Circle of Experts (ICE), a national advisory body and part of the Pathway to Canada Target 1 federal policy initiative, released the We Rise Together (2018) report. The report articulated how Indigenous-led conservation can help achieve national conservation goals while advancing reconciliation in Canada. ICE advocated for the advancement of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), which are “lands and waters where Indigenous governments have the primary role in protecting and conserving ecosystems through Indigenous laws, governance and knowledge systems” (ICE, 2018, pg. 35). IPCAs, therefore, are both a conservation mechanism and a tool to advance self-determination and sovereignty for Indigenous Nations. ICE called upon environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) to partner with Indigenous governments in the design, implementation, and management of IPCAs (ICE, 2018, pg.61).

In 2019, the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP) was launched to continue the momentum of the Indigenous Circle of Experts. An Indigenous-led network, the CRP seeks to investigate, inform, and transform conservation strategy and practice by centering Indigenous leadership, rights, responsibilities, and knowledge. Several large ENGOs, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), the David Suzuki Foundation, Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, Nature United, the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada, and World Wildlife Fund Canada are active partners in the CRP. There are also a number of smaller conservation organizations that engage with CRP resources and attend CRP learning events, such as our popular virtual campfire webinar series. As the manager of the CRP, one question I receive consistently from non-Indigenous conservation organizations is “how is our role in conservation changing?”. It is through my work with the CRP that I have come to realize that one important contribution I could make as a white settler is to support the conservation sector in deepening their reconciliatory and decolonial commitments.  

Institutional ethnography: Revealing ruling relations to enable change 

Stein et al. (2023) recently interviewed 12 conservation leaders in Canada to learn about how they are confronting colonial conservation within their organizations. They found that most of these organizations are in the early stages of learning to engage with Indigenous governments in ways that "do not reproduce colonial relations and practices" (pg. 7). Williams et al. (2012) argue that analysis of practices, which are activities that humans regularly engage in, can bring about real-world change for justice-seeking communities. No one has yet completed a detailed analysis of the specific institutional practices conservation organizations are employing, how these practices may limit or enable decolonization, and how they are hooked into trans-local processes and structures. My research aims to respond to these gaps in the literature while helping to catalyze social change within the Canadian conservation sector.  

During my qualifying exam preparations, I have been spending a lot of time reading the work of resurgent scholars, like Glen Coulthard (2014) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2018). Through this engagement, I have come to appreciate that decolonial change must attend to both material/structural change (attentive to complex power relations) and psycho-affective change (subjectivities). This framing has helped guide me towards two methodological approaches for my project: institutional ethnography and participant observation of decolonial pedagogies at work. Through institutional ethnography, I hope to work with five national-scale conservation organizations in Canada that have influence over environmental policy, play an important role in shaping the Canadian public’s understanding of conservation and human-nature relationships, and have publicly committed to supporting Indigenous-led conservation.  

First created by sociologist Dorothy Smith in the late early 1990’s, institutional ethnography (IE) is a methodology that been taken up by scholars and activists who are interested in explaining how the everyday lives of people are shaped and influenced by forces beyond their knowledge and direct experience, with the goal of “organizing to disrupt social relations of oppression operating in and through their own lives” (Nicols, Griffith & MacLarnon, 2017, pg.111). IE comes from a feminist reading of Marx and Engel and their approach to social science. As an empirical methodology, IE is “grounded in actual people, their work, and the real conditions of their lives” (Smith & Griffith, 2022, pg. 10; Nicoles & Griffith, 2017). Exploring a “social world happening” requires a different approach from other qualitative methodologies which can “objectify people and events, and slot them into theoretical categories to arrive at explanation” (Rankin, 2017, pg. 2; Campbell & Gregor, 2002, pg. 17). When conducting an IE, data collection and findings must be “grounded in the materiality of people’s doings” and this ontological core is what makes institutional ethnography “unique among qualitative approaches” (Rankin, 2017, pg. 2). Institutional ethnographers strive to show, not to tell, how social relations work. Inquiry starts with people and what they do, striving to show how their “experiences are put together by forces and powers beyond their practice and direct knowledge” (Nicols, Griffith, & McLaren, 2017, pg. 111). 

I am interested in IE for its potential to show how colonial relations are embodied, enacted, and reproduced in the work of settler conservation organizations, despite well-intentioned efforts to support Indigenous-led conservation. I am drawn to institutional ethnography because of its focus on power relations and its ability to describe how those relations structure and coordinate the everyday lives of people, even from afar. From my understanding, this aligns well with Indigenous resurgent scholars who describe settler-colonialism as a relation of domination that is maintained by social structures, processes, and practices (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2018). When these processes and practices shift, these relations of domination can become reified, though expressed in a different form (Simpson, 2018). Alternatively, these moments of shift can be thought of as "moments of reconfiguration” when the state and settler-colonial relations are made vulnerable to intervention (Snelgrove and Wildcat, 2023). As a starting place, my IE will seek to understand how the settler conservation sector in Canada works in ways that open and/or foreclose possibilities for decolonizing conservation. I will strive to answer the following questions: 

1) What is the work that settler conservation organizations are doing?  

2) What are the ruling relations that coordinate that work across the sector?

3) What interventions are settler conservation organizations using to shift colonial relations, and to what effect? 

I am also interested in institutional ethnography (IE) because of its strong synergies with participatory action research, community-engaged research, Indigenous and feminist methodologies, anti-colonial, and anti-racist approaches ( Campbell and Gregor, 2002, pg. 109). Power is a central concern in decolonial scholarship, and power is also central to institutional ethnography inquiry. Campbell and Gregor (2002) argue that IE can help people “gain the skills to see how power works through special institutional forms of knowing” so they can begin to “take more control over their lives” (pg. 12). Similarly, DeVault and McCoy (2006) emphasize the liberatory potential of IE, arguing that IE can help specify possible "levers" or targets for activist intervention (pg. 19).  

In the context of my project, I hope to show the participating conservation organization how their work is hooked into structures and processes that uphold colonial relations. Many of the organizations I work with assume that they are facing unique challenges with respect to supporting Indigenous-led conservation. While it is true that attempts to enact decolonial change must be attentive and responsive to place-based contexts and relations, trans-local and structural power dynamics also have an influence over the range of possible decolonial movements. IE has the potential to show conservation organizations how their work is coordinated by similar (or the same) ruling relations. I am hoping this will help the sector understand where to focus their advocacy efforts, and how they may need to work together to bring about change. Not only will the IE be helpful for settler conservation organizations, but the study's outcomes can also be used by Indigenous Nations, governments, and organizations to hold these organizations to account. All my work is intended to support Indigenous-led conservation futures, and this project will be one more resource Indigenous leaders can draw upon as they navigate and negotiate change for their communities.  

Works Cited

Campbell, M.L., & Gregor, F.M. (2002). Mapping social relations: A primer in doing institutional ethnography. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 

Carroll, C. (2014). Native enclosures: Tribal national parks and the progressive politics of environmental stewardship in Indian Country. Geoforum, 53, 31-40. http://doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.02.003

Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (2024). About us. https://conservation-reconciliation.ca/about-us-1.

Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: The politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

Curnow, J., & Helferty, A. (2018). Contradictions of Solidarity: Whiteness, settler coloniality, and the mainstream environmental movement. Environment and Society, 9(1), 145–163. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090110

DeVault, M.L. & McCoy, L. (2006). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In Smith, D.E. (Ed), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 15-45). Rowman & Littlefield

Garnett, S.T., Burgess, N.D., Fa, J.E., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Molnár, Z., Robinson, C.J., Watson, J.E.M., Zander, K.K., Austin, B., Brondizio, E.S., Collier, N.F., Duncan, T., Ellis, E., Geyle, H., Jackson, M.V., Jonas, H., Malmer, P., McGowan, B., Sivongxay, A. & Leiper, I. (2018). A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation. Nature Sustainability, 1, 369–374. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0100-6

Indigenous Circle of Experts. (2018). We Rise Together: Achieving Pathway to Canada Target 1 through the creation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas in the spirit and practice of reconciliation. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57e007452e69cf9a7af0a033/t/5ab94aca6d2a7338ecb1d05e/1522092766605/PA234-ICE_Report_2018_Mar_22_web.pdf.

Moola, F., & Roth, R. (2019). Moving beyond colonial conservation models: Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas offer hope for biodiversity and advancing reconciliation in the Canadian boreal forest, Environmental Reviews, 27(2), 200-201. http://doi:10.1139/er-2018-0091

Nature Conservancy of Canada. (2023, March 5). Indigenous conservation. Nature Conservancy of Canada. https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/what-we-do/indigenous-conservation/

Nature United. (2023, March 5). Our priorities: Indigenous-led conservation. Nature United. https://www.natureunited.ca/what-we-do/our-priorities/indigenous-led-conservation/

Nichols, N., Griffith, A., & McLarnon, M. (2017). Community-Based and Participatory Approaches in Institutional Ethnography. In Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography (Vol. 15, pp. 107–124). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042-319220170000015008. 

Rankin, J. (2017). Conducting Analysis in Institutional Ethnography: Analytical Work Prior to Commencing Data Collection. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1), 160940691773448-. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917734484 

Scott, J. (2024, January 6). A demand for diversity in the environmental sector. Black outdoors. https://blackoutdoors.wordpress.com/2023/01/06/a-demand-for-diversity-in-the-environmental-sector/.

Simpson, L.B. (2018). As we have always been: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, D. E., & Griffith, A. I. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography: Creating a sociology for people. University of Toronto Press.  

Snelgrove, C. & Wildcat, M. (2023). Political action in the time of reconciliation. In Stark H.D., Craft, A. & Hōkūlani, K.A. (Eds). Resurgence in the age of reconciliation. University of Toronto Press.

Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., Hunt, D. & Oliveira da Silva Huni Kui, S. (2023). Complexities of confronting colonialism in conservation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369749616_Complexities_of_Confronting_Colonialism_in_Conservation.

Williams, V., Gall, M., Mason-Angelow, V., Read, S., & Webb, J. (2021). Misfitting and social practice theory: incorporating disability into the performance and (re)enactment of social practices, Disability & Society, doi:10.1080/09687599.2021.1947195.

World Wildlife Fund Canada. (2023, March 5). Indigenous-led conservation. World Wildlife Fund Canada. https://wwf.ca/about-us/indigenous-led-conservation/