Digital technology and human development: A charter for nature conservation

Ambio 2015, 44(Suppl. 4):S527–S537 DOI 10.1007/s13280-015-0703-3 Digital technology and human development: A charter for nature conservation Georgina Maffey, Hilary Homans, Ken Banks, Koen Arts Abstract The application of digital technology in conservation holds much potential for advancing the understanding of, and facilitating interaction with, the natural world. In other sectors, digital technology has long been used to engage communities and share information. Human development—which holds parallels with the nature conservation sector—has seen a proliferation of innovation in technological development. Throughout this Perspective, we consider what nature conservation can learn from the introduction of digital technology in human development. From this, we derive a charter to be used before and throughout project development, in order to help reduce replication and failure of digital innovation in nature conservation projects. We argue that the proposed charter will promote collaboration with the development of digital tools and ensure that nature conservation projects progress appropriately with the development of new digital technologies. Keywords Charter of best practice
Nature conservation
Mobile phone
Developing world
Information Age
Innovation INTRODUCTION The current era in the history of humankind has been described as ‘the Information Age,’ a period characterized by the increasing use of digital technology to mediate access to, and management of, information (Mason 1986; Castells 2010). Like many other societal domains, the environmental sciences have embraced digital technology to manage information and enhance analytical power (Stafford et al. 1994, p. 3). The establishment of sub-disciplines such as ecological modeling and bioinformatics, as well as the embedded use of digital technology within others (e.g., Geographic Information Systems—GIS), is testament to this. Discussion on the use of digital technology in the context of nature conservation (hereafter conservation) in its broadest sense1 is less developed (Arts et al. 2015a). Those academic studies that have begun to consider the use of digital technology in conservation have cited factors such as cost (Graham et al. 2012), durability (Stevens et al. 2013), and data integration (Teacher et al. 2013) as key challenges in this area. Yet, the same studies also emphasize the potential that digital technology holds to improve data collection in the field to share information and to empower local communities involved in conservation. Domains such as health, education, and human development have embraced the notion of empowerment, and continue to explore the use of digital technology as a facilitator of attitudinal or behavioral change—e.g., investment in telemedicine (Rosser et al. 2009). Consequently, such domains can offer insight into how digital technology might best be used in conservation; in this sense, conservationists may, for instance, be able to ‘leap frog’ the development of inappropriate tools. The aim of this Perspective is to explore the potential lessons that conservationists can learn from other domains on using digital technology as a tool to meet conservation goals. Due to parallels between the conservation and human development domains (Adams et al. 2004; Büscher and Dressler 2012), we focus primarily on examples from human development, a domain that has capacity-building characteristics (i.e., the ability of individuals and 1 We use the term conservation to refer to the preservation and protection of the natural world—a definition that is inclusive, not exclusive, of human interaction (Adams 2009, p. xiv).  The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com www.kva.se/en 123 S528 Ambio 2015, 44(Suppl. 4):S527–S537 organizations to perform functions, solve problems, and set and achieve objectives—United Nations Economic and Social Council 2006). We conclude with a proposed charter of best practice for the application of the lessons cited and the constructive future use of digital technology in conservation. the fact that on a day-to-day basis, conservation issues do not always have the same urgency for individuals as other domains and facets of modern-day life (Jepson and Canney 2003). Yet as such, technology, which is increasingly integrated into modern-day life, may provide an opportunity to facilitate a connection between conservation and other domains. BACKGROUND Digital connectors Three dimensions This Perspective revolves around three dimensions: digital technology, human development, and conservation. While there are parallels between human development and conservation, it should be considered that different key drivers are behind changes in each of the three dimensions. Human development is influenced by cultural, economic, environmental, political, and social factors that affect people (Malik 2014). Thus innovation in human development tends to focus on capacity building (United Nations Economic and Social Council 2006) either to mitigate (potential) threats or to improve the status quo. Because of this trend, we consider human development as being problem driven. The development of digital technology is, on the whole, market driven due to influences from the commercial sector—e.g., competitive innovation, as companies file for patents to protect their technological developments. However, at the interface of human and technological development innovation often occurs through non-profit organizations and is problem orientated in its design. Such innovations tend to arise from an open-source approach, which can result in further innovation in technology use by others. Designing digital technology to address problems in this way can also be influenced by the availability of funding, which in turn may result in the replication of projects that do not fully address the actual problem (cf. Araral Jr 2005). Thus, while competition does exist in the non-profit sector, it has a fundamentally different character to that in the commercial sector (Lall 1993). Conservation can be thought of as mission driven or concern driven (Soulé 1985; Meine et al. 2006; Mace 2014) with desires to protect landscapes and species that are (potentially) threatened by anthropogenic factors. Such motivations to conserve hold clear similarities to those that underpin problem-driven human development, and the allocation of funding to support conservation projects is strongly influenced by social pressure and public policy (Czech et al. 1998; Ferraro and Pattanayak 2006). However, it is often more difficult to see the results of conservation efforts within the same timeframes as those of human development projects. This may in part be due to 123 There have arguably been two key developments that have disproportionately influenced individuals’ behaviors in the Information Age: the Internet and the mobile phone (Schwanen and Kwan 2008). The Internet ac (...truncated)