By Lucy Jenner
What was the inspiration for this article?
- I work in nature restoration, alongside research, and I was increasingly hearing about an apparent need for more and more data, and the deployment of technology to measure and monitor land. My previous research has also highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on ‘nature-tech’ (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901124002235). I thought it would be interesting to understand what people actually do with data and if this helps or hinders attempts to use land in more environmentally friendly and socially democratic ways. As the project developed, it became clear that the community I am working with are attempting to not only own and manage their own land use data, but also to create data and bring alternative types of data (such as creative interpretations of land) into consideration. I thought this was an interesting angle on research narratives both around datafication and technology, as well as the literature on community and land.
How does your article inform future research?
- An interesting future angle would be to take a longitudinal study to understand if and how the community approaches outlined in our article impact the way land is used, and the involvement of communities in those decisions. This would require a researcher to be embedded in the community for 5+ years.
Why did you choose People and Nature for your research?
- My research is well aligned with the goals of P&N, particularly the focus on interactions and relationships between people and nature, which research (by ourselves and others) finds to be increasingly governed by data and technology, with wide-ranging implications.
Read the full published paper – ‘We want to be the hosts of this story’: Learning from community-led approaches to data governance of land use for nature recovery
Read the Plain Language Summary of the published paper
Relational Thinking 