Biases in the production of knowledge on ecosystem services and poverty alleviation
E ST EV E CORB E RA ,S ARA MAESTRE-ANDRÉS,LAURA CAL VE T-MIR DAN B RO C K I N G T O N,CAR OL INE HOWE andWILLIAM M. ADAMS
Abstract Research into the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being, including poverty alleviation, has blossomed. However, little is known about who has pro- ducedthis knowledge,what collaborative patterns andinstitu- tional and funding conditions have underpinned it, or what
implicationsthesemattersmayhave.Toinvestigate thepoten- tial implications of such production for conservation science and practice, we address this by developing a social network analysis of the most prolific writers in the production of knowledge about ecosystem services and poverty alleviation. Weshowthat 70%of these authors are men,most are trained in either the biological sciencesor economics andalmostnone in the humanities. Eighty per cent of authors obtained their PhDfromuniversities intheEUor theUSA, andthey are cur- rently employed in these regions. The co-authorship network is strongly collaborative,without dominant authors, andwith the top 30most cited scholars being based in theUSAand co- authoring frequently. These findings suggest, firstly, that the production of knowledge on ecosystem services and poverty alleviation research has the same geographical and gender biases that characterize knowledge production in other scien- tific areas and, secondly, that there is anexpertisebias that also characterizes other environmentalmatters. This is despite the fact that the research field of ecosystem services and poverty alleviation, by its nature, requires a multidisciplinary lens. This could be overcome through promoting more extensive collaboration and knowledge co-production.
Keywords Ecosystem services, interdisciplinarity, knowl- edge co-production, multidisciplinary, poverty, social net- work analysis, well-being
ESTEVE CORBERA* (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0001-7970-4411)
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology & Department of Geography, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain. E-mail
esteve.corbera@
uab.cat
LAURACALVET-MIR† and SARAMAESTRE-ANDRÉS Institute of Environmental Science andTechnology,UniversitatAutònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
DAN BROCKINGTON Sheffield Institute for International Development, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
CAROLINE HOWE Centre for Environmental Policy, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London, London, UK
WILLIAM M. ADAMS Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
*Also at: Institució Catalana d’Estudis i RecercaAvançats, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
†Also at: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Received 15 November 2019. Revision requested 20 May 2020. Accepted 21 September 2020. First published online 17 May 2021.
Supplementary material for this article is available at
doi.org/10.1017/S0030605320000940
Introduction S
ince the 1990s, research into the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being, including
poverty alleviation, has blossomed (Sandifer et al., 2015; Grima et al., 2019). This burgeoning literature owes its exis- tence, in part at least, to the scientific foundations laid by theMillennium EcosystemAssessment (2005), and to a num- ber of research programmes, including the Natural Capital Project (at Stanford University, USA, from 2006) and the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation programme, es- tablished in the UK in 2008 (Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation Programme, 2018; Natural Capital Project, 2019). By mid 2019 the Natural Capital Project had pro- duced .600 publications and the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation programme.400. Other research pro- grammes exploring linkages between ecosystem services and well-being include the Valuing Nature Network in the UK, and several funding calls under the EU’s 7th Frame- work, Horizon 2020 and Biodiversa programmes. It is increasingly recognized that it matters where and
how knowledge about society and environment is generated (Müller, 2021) and there is increasing attention to the role of international scientific networks in producing knowl- edge about global environmental problems and influencing policy-making (Mitchell et al., 2006). Patterns in the pro- duction of knowledge about ecosystems services and pov- erty are of particular relevance as poverty rates and direct dependence on ecosystem services are highest in the Global South (Suich et al., 2015), yet many researchers are based in the Global North. The most highly cited articles (i.e. those with.100 citations) on global ecosystem services were written by authors from the USA, Canada and the EU (Zhang et al., 2019). Analyses of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has shown that the balance of regions, genders, disciplines and knowledge systems is still dispro- portionally dominated by male natural scientists from the Global North (Montana & Borie, 2016; Timpte et al., 2017; Díaz-Reviriego et al., 2019), patterns previously observed within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Hulme & Mahoney, 2010; Castree et al., 2014; Corbera et al., 2016; Gay-Antaki & Liverman, 2018).
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 868–877 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605320000940
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