Catherine Corson
Biographic Data
| ID | 202346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Corson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Corson |
| SIGNATURE | CORSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mount Holyoke College |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-9023-2855 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 629 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Indigenous territorial rights in the Global Biodiversity Framework: Creating a third pathway to 30x30
At the conclusion of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD-COP15) in Montreal, Canada in December 2022, many rights-holders and allies commended the inclusion of language respecting Indigenous rights and knowledge in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). In particular, they pointed to the recognition of and rights to Indigenous and traditional territories in Target 3, commonly refe…
Conservation at a crossroads: Governing by Global Targets, Innovative Financing, and Techno-Optimism or Radical Reform
Biodiversity conservation is at a crossroads. A number of trends are converging with the potential to transform our understanding of nature and how we conserve it. First, conservation policy makers are advocating increasingly ambitious global biodiversity targets, such as the agreement to protect 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coast and marine areas by 2030 made at the December 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biologi…
Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid
Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi‐sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non‐profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As …
Doing Strong Collaborative Fieldwork in Human Geography
Although increasingly common in the academy, collaboration is not yet the norm in human geography. Drawing on insights from ten years of experience with collaborative event ethnography (CEE), we argue that strong approaches to collaborative fieldwork offer rich opportunities for human geography. CEE involves teams of researchers conducting fieldwork together at large international events, collaborating on all aspects of the research process from …
From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to…
Corridors of Power: The Politics of Environmental Aid to Madagascar
A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar’s rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the…
Assembling global conservation governance
Enclosing the global commons: The convention on biological diversity and green grabbing
Assessing the Impact of Perinatal HIV Case Management on Outcomes Along the HIV Care Continuum for Pregnant and Postpartum Women Living With HIV, Philadelphia 2005–2013
A history of conservation politics in Madagascar
In this article, I argue that reconciling conservation and livelihoods in Madagascar requires an examination of the historical processes and political-economic systems through which the strong foreign influence on conservation has formed. I begin by documenting how a group of scientists and policy-makers came together in the 1970s and 1980s to mobilize global attention to the importance of protecting Madagascar’s flora and fauna. I illustrate how…
The History of Forest Politics in Madagascar
Connecting Corridors
This chapter examines the multiple historical and contemporary “corridors” that connect a village in eastern Madagascar to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. From several vantage points it briefly analyzes how various actors—representing branches of the U.S. and Madagascar governments, other donors, contractors, NGOs, scientific organizations, and villages—have developed, negotiated, and implemented U.S. environmental foreign aid to Madagascar. In …
Corridors of Power: The Politics of Environmental Aid to Madagascar
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnog…
The making of a 'charismatic' carbon credit: Clean cookstoves and 'uncooperative' women in western Kenya
The Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change first legitimized state-to-state carbon trading in 1997 with the goal of cost-effectively reducing carbon emissions. Voluntary carbon markets for private trading have emerged since, often claimed by their proponents to pioneer innovative projects that reduce poverty as well as carbon emissions. We use the case of a cookstove project, financed by the carbon emissions reductio…
The right to resist: Disciplining civil society at Rio+20
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the United Nations (UN) Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and its preparatory meetings, we examine how the official UN 'participatory' process for engaging civil society in Rio+20 negotiations simultaneously enabled and disciplined contestation through processes such as seeking consensus around a common statement, professionalizing civil society representatives and controlling protests…
Orchestrating Nature: Ethnographies of NatureTM Inc
Everyone′s Solution? Defining and Redefining Protected Areas at the Convention on Biological Diversity
For decades, conservationists have remained steadfastly committed to protected areas (PAs) as the best means to conserve biodiversity. Using Collaborative Event Ethnography of the 10 th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/CoP), we examine how the PA concept remains hegemonic in conservation policy. We argue that, as a broadening base of actors frame their political objectives through PAs in orde…
Capturing the Personal in Politics: Ethnographies of Global Environmental Governance
In this article we elaborate on how we use collaborative event ethnography to study global environmental governance. We discuss how it builds on traditional forms of ethnography, as well as on approaches that use ethnography to study policy-making in multiple institutional and geographical sites. We argue that global environmental meetings and negotiations offer opportunities to study critical historical moments in the making of emergent regimes …
Studying Global Environmental Meetings to Understand Global Environmental Governance: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity
This special issue introduces readers to collaborative event ethnography (CEE), a method developed to support the ethnographic study of large global environmental meetings. CEE was applied by a group of seventeen researchers at the Tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to study the politics of biodiversity conservation. In this introduction, we describe our interests in global environmental meetin…
Grabbing “Green”: Markets, Environmental Governance and the Materialization of Natural Capital
Over the past two decades, the incorporation of market logics into environment and conservation policy has led to a reconceptualization of “nature.” Resulting constructs like ecosystem services and biodiversity derivatives, as well as finance mechanisms like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, species banking, and carbon trading, offer new avenues for accumulation and set the context for new enclosures. As these practice…
Seizing Center Stage: Ecosystem Services, Live, at the Convention on Biological Diversity
Over the past decade, the concept of ecosystem services has become a central guiding framework for environmental conservation. Techniques of valuation, payments to protect ecosystem services, and efforts to put a price on nature increasingly characterize environmental policy. We analyze the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP-10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as a critical moment in the production of ecosystem services as a disc…
On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation
Teeb Begins Now: A Virtual Moment in the Production of Natural Capital
This article uses theories of virtualism to analyse the role of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project in the production of natural capital. Presented at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the project seeks to redress the 'economic invisibility of nature' by quantifying the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. This endeavour to put an economic value on ecosystems makes nature legibl…
Enclosing the global commons: The Convention on Biological Diversity and Green Grabbing
Green grabs,' or the expropriation of land or resources for environmental purposes, constitute an important component of the current global land grab explosion. We argue that international environmental institutions are increasingly cultivating the terrain for green grabbing. As sites that circulate and sanction forms of knowledge, establish regulatory devices and programmatic targets, and align and articulate actors with these mechanisms, they s…
From Rhetoric to Practice: How High-Profile Politics Impeded Community Consultation in Madagascar's New Protected Areas
When Madagascar's former president announced at the 5th World Parks Congress his intention to triple the country's protected areas, he underscored that the new parks would engage local communities. Donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have since touted the program's commitment to community involvement. However, research in Madagascar's eastern rainforest revealed how a series of political decisions at multiple scales impeded village co…
Territorialization, enclosure and neoliberalism: Non-state influence in struggles over Madagascar's forests
Using the case of the expansion of Madagascar's protected areas, this paper examines 'state' territorialization under neoliberalism as a process that involves non-state as well as state institutions. Challenging notions of state territorialization as a state controlled process, it reveals the state as a vehicle through which numerous non-state entities sought to expand their control of and authority over Madagascar's forests. It argues that, as s…
Enclosing the global commons: The Convention on Biological Diversity and Green Grabbing
Green grabs,' or the expropriation of land or resources for environmental purposes, constitute an important component of the current global land grab explosion. We argue that international environmental institutions are increasingly cultivating the terrain for green grabbing. As sites that circulate and sanction forms of knowledge, establish regulatory devices and programmatic targets, and align and articulate actors with these mechanisms, they s…
Studying Global Environmental Meetings to Understand Global Environmental Governance: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity
This special issue introduces readers to collaborative event ethnography (CEE), a method developed to support the ethnographic study of large global environmental meetings. CEE was applied by a group of seventeen researchers at the Tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to study the politics of biodiversity conservation. In this introduction, we describe our interests in global environmental meetin…
Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation
By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy-making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the con…
Teeb Begins Now: A Virtual Moment in the Production of Natural Capital
This article uses theories of virtualism to analyse the role of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project in the production of natural capital. Presented at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the project seeks to redress the 'economic invisibility of nature' by quantifying the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. This endeavour to put an economic value on ecosystems makes nature legibl…
Capturing the Personal in Politics: Ethnographies of Global Environmental Governance
In this article we elaborate on how we use collaborative event ethnography to study global environmental governance. We discuss how it builds on traditional forms of ethnography, as well as on approaches that use ethnography to study policy-making in multiple institutional and geographical sites. We argue that global environmental meetings and negotiations offer opportunities to study critical historical moments in the making of emergent regimes …
Grabbing “Green”: Markets, Environmental Governance and the Materialization of Natural Capital
Over the past two decades, the incorporation of market logics into environment and conservation policy has led to a reconceptualization of “nature.” Resulting constructs like ecosystem services and biodiversity derivatives, as well as finance mechanisms like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, species banking, and carbon trading, offer new avenues for accumulation and set the context for new enclosures. As these practice…
The right to resist: Disciplining civil society at Rio+20
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the United Nations (UN) Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and its preparatory meetings, we examine how the official UN 'participatory' process for engaging civil society in Rio+20 negotiations simultaneously enabled and disciplined contestation through processes such as seeking consensus around a common statement, professionalizing civil society representatives and controlling protests…
Assembling global conservation governance
Doing Strong Collaborative Fieldwork in Human Geography
Although increasingly common in the academy, collaboration is not yet the norm in human geography. Drawing on insights from ten years of experience with collaborative event ethnography (CEE), we argue that strong approaches to collaborative fieldwork offer rich opportunities for human geography. CEE involves teams of researchers conducting fieldwork together at large international events, collaborating on all aspects of the research process from …
From Rhetoric to Practice: How High-Profile Politics Impeded Community Consultation in Madagascar's New Protected Areas
When Madagascar's former president announced at the 5th World Parks Congress his intention to triple the country's protected areas, he underscored that the new parks would engage local communities. Donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have since touted the program's commitment to community involvement. However, research in Madagascar's eastern rainforest revealed how a series of political decisions at multiple scales impeded village co…
Seizing Center Stage: Ecosystem Services, Live, at the Convention on Biological Diversity
Over the past decade, the concept of ecosystem services has become a central guiding framework for environmental conservation. Techniques of valuation, payments to protect ecosystem services, and efforts to put a price on nature increasingly characterize environmental policy. We analyze the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP-10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as a critical moment in the production of ecosystem services as a disc…
The making of a 'charismatic' carbon credit: Clean cookstoves and 'uncooperative' women in western Kenya
The Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change first legitimized state-to-state carbon trading in 1997 with the goal of cost-effectively reducing carbon emissions. Voluntary carbon markets for private trading have emerged since, often claimed by their proponents to pioneer innovative projects that reduce poverty as well as carbon emissions. We use the case of a cookstove project, financed by the carbon emissions reductio…
On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation
Achieving a secure energy future: Environmental and economic issues
Energy, economics, and the environment are interdependent. Land, water, atmospheric, and biological resources are being degraded by current high energy consumption. U.S. energy consumption is the highest in the world and the U.S. Department of Energy reports that the United States has only about 10 years of known and potentially discoverable oil reserves. The U.S. should reduce its energy consumption by one half to help restore the quality of the…
Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid
Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi‐sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non‐profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As …
From paper to practice? Assembling a rights-based conservation approach
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to…
A history of conservation politics in Madagascar
In this article, I argue that reconciling conservation and livelihoods in Madagascar requires an examination of the historical processes and political-economic systems through which the strong foreign influence on conservation has formed. I begin by documenting how a group of scientists and policy-makers came together in the 1970s and 1980s to mobilize global attention to the importance of protecting Madagascar’s flora and fauna. I illustrate how…
Conservation at a crossroads: Governing by Global Targets, Innovative Financing, and Techno-Optimism or Radical Reform
Biodiversity conservation is at a crossroads. A number of trends are converging with the potential to transform our understanding of nature and how we conserve it. First, conservation policy makers are advocating increasingly ambitious global biodiversity targets, such as the agreement to protect 30% of terrestrial, inland water, and of coast and marine areas by 2030 made at the December 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biologi…
Achieving a secure energy future: Environmental and economic issues
Energy, economics, and the environment are interdependent. Land, water, atmospheric, and biological resources are being degraded by current high energy consumption. U.S. energy consumption is the highest in the world and the U.S. Department of Energy reports that the United States has only about 10 years of known and potentially discoverable oil reserves. The U.S. should reduce its energy consumption by one half to help restore the quality of the…
Shifting Environmental Governance in a Neoliberal World: US AID for Conservation
By exploring the shifting and uneven power relations among state, market and civil society organizations in US environmental foreign aid policy-making, this article forges new ground in conversations about conservation and neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, an evolving group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has lobbied the US Congress to support environmental foreign assistance. However, the 1980s and 1990s rise of neoliberalism laid the con…
From Rhetoric to Practice: How High-Profile Politics Impeded Community Consultation in Madagascar's New Protected Areas
When Madagascar's former president announced at the 5th World Parks Congress his intention to triple the country's protected areas, he underscored that the new parks would engage local communities. Donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have since touted the program's commitment to community involvement. However, research in Madagascar's eastern rainforest revealed how a series of political decisions at multiple scales impeded village co…
Territorialization, enclosure and neoliberalism: Non-state influence in struggles over Madagascar's forests
Using the case of the expansion of Madagascar's protected areas, this paper examines 'state' territorialization under neoliberalism as a process that involves non-state as well as state institutions. Challenging notions of state territorialization as a state controlled process, it reveals the state as a vehicle through which numerous non-state entities sought to expand their control of and authority over Madagascar's forests. It argues that, as s…
On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation
Teeb Begins Now: A Virtual Moment in the Production of Natural Capital
This article uses theories of virtualism to analyse the role of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project in the production of natural capital. Presented at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the project seeks to redress the 'economic invisibility of nature' by quantifying the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. This endeavour to put an economic value on ecosystems makes nature legibl…
Enclosing the global commons: The Convention on Biological Diversity and Green Grabbing
Green grabs,' or the expropriation of land or resources for environmental purposes, constitute an important component of the current global land grab explosion. We argue that international environmental institutions are increasingly cultivating the terrain for green grabbing. As sites that circulate and sanction forms of knowledge, establish regulatory devices and programmatic targets, and align and articulate actors with these mechanisms, they s…
Grabbing “Green”: Markets, Environmental Governance and the Materialization of Natural Capital
Over the past two decades, the incorporation of market logics into environment and conservation policy has led to a reconceptualization of “nature.” Resulting constructs like ecosystem services and biodiversity derivatives, as well as finance mechanisms like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, species banking, and carbon trading, offer new avenues for accumulation and set the context for new enclosures. As these practice…
Seizing Center Stage: Ecosystem Services, Live, at the Convention on Biological Diversity
Over the past decade, the concept of ecosystem services has become a central guiding framework for environmental conservation. Techniques of valuation, payments to protect ecosystem services, and efforts to put a price on nature increasingly characterize environmental policy. We analyze the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP-10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as a critical moment in the production of ecosystem services as a disc…
Orchestrating Nature: Ethnographies of NatureTM Inc
Everyone′s Solution? Defining and Redefining Protected Areas at the Convention on Biological Diversity
For decades, conservationists have remained steadfastly committed to protected areas (PAs) as the best means to conserve biodiversity. Using Collaborative Event Ethnography of the 10 th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/CoP), we examine how the PA concept remains hegemonic in conservation policy. We argue that, as a broadening base of actors frame their political objectives through PAs in orde…
Capturing the Personal in Politics: Ethnographies of Global Environmental Governance
In this article we elaborate on how we use collaborative event ethnography to study global environmental governance. We discuss how it builds on traditional forms of ethnography, as well as on approaches that use ethnography to study policy-making in multiple institutional and geographical sites. We argue that global environmental meetings and negotiations offer opportunities to study critical historical moments in the making of emergent regimes …
Studying Global Environmental Meetings to Understand Global Environmental Governance: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity
This special issue introduces readers to collaborative event ethnography (CEE), a method developed to support the ethnographic study of large global environmental meetings. CEE was applied by a group of seventeen researchers at the Tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to study the politics of biodiversity conservation. In this introduction, we describe our interests in global environmental meetin…
The making of a 'charismatic' carbon credit: Clean cookstoves and 'uncooperative' women in western Kenya
The Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change first legitimized state-to-state carbon trading in 1997 with the goal of cost-effectively reducing carbon emissions. Voluntary carbon markets for private trading have emerged since, often claimed by their proponents to pioneer innovative projects that reduce poverty as well as carbon emissions. We use the case of a cookstove project, financed by the carbon emissions reductio…
The right to resist: Disciplining civil society at Rio+20
Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the United Nations (UN) Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and its preparatory meetings, we examine how the official UN 'participatory' process for engaging civil society in Rio+20 negotiations simultaneously enabled and disciplined contestation through processes such as seeking consensus around a common statement, professionalizing civil society representatives and controlling protests…
The History of Forest Politics in Madagascar
Connecting Corridors
This chapter examines the multiple historical and contemporary “corridors” that connect a village in eastern Madagascar to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. From several vantage points it briefly analyzes how various actors—representing branches of the U.S. and Madagascar governments, other donors, contractors, NGOs, scientific organizations, and villages—have developed, negotiated, and implemented U.S. environmental foreign aid to Madagascar. In …
Corridors of Power: The Politics of Environmental Aid to Madagascar
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnog…
Assessing the Impact of Perinatal HIV Case Management on Outcomes Along the HIV Care Continuum for Pregnant and Postpartum Women Living With HIV, Philadelphia 2005–2013
A history of conservation politics in Madagascar
In this article, I argue that reconciling conservation and livelihoods in Madagascar requires an examination of the historical processes and political-economic systems through which the strong foreign influence on conservation has formed. I begin by documenting how a group of scientists and policy-makers came together in the 1970s and 1980s to mobilize global attention to the importance of protecting Madagascar’s flora and fauna. I illustrate how…
Enclosing the global commons: The convention on biological diversity and green grabbing
Corridors of Power: The Politics of Environmental Aid to Madagascar
A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar’s rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the…
Assembling global conservation governance
Corridors of Power: Assembling US Environmental Foreign Aid
Using the US Agency for International Development's environmental program in Madagascar as a lens, I offer a historically grounded, relational, and multi‐sited methodology for understanding the transnational processes that constitute political forests in the contemporary era. I argue that neoliberal reforms conditioned the emergence of a public–private–non‐profit alliance, which promoted biodiversity conservation as a US foreign aid priority. As …
Doing Strong Collaborative Fieldwork in Human Geography
Although increasingly common in the academy, collaboration is not yet the norm in human geography. Drawing on insights from ten years of experience with collaborative event ethnography (CEE), we argue that strong approaches to collaborative fieldwork offer rich opportunities for human geography. CEE involves teams of researchers conducting fieldwork together at large international events, collaborating on all aspects of the research process from …
Political science (19 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (14 works) · Economics (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Politics (11 works) · Ecology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Convention on Biological Diversity (8 works) · Corporate governance (8 works) · Geography (8 works)