POWERSHIFT
Reshaping Power Moments through Reflexive Practice
Mechanisms and Durability in Human-Wildlife Conflict Governance
Background
Conservation initiatives often bring together diverse actors, including researchers, practitioners, local communities, government institutions, and non governmental organizations. Although these collaborations are often presented as participatory and cooperative, they are shaped by unequal relations of power. Differences in knowledge, authority, resources, mandates, and institutional position influence whose perspectives are heard, who makes decisions, and whose priorities guide action.
These dynamics often become especially visible in what this project calls power moments. These are situations in which roles, responsibilities, values, or goals are negotiated, challenged, or redefined. Such moments can shape the direction of a conservation initiative and strongly affect relationships between actors. As part of POWERSHIFT, this project starts from the idea that understanding these moments is essential for improving both collaboration and conservation practice.
VaNaTe is organised in different working packages
Work package 1
WP1 seems to elicit and spatially map values of nature and NCP expressed by landowners and managers through content analysis, photo-voice, surveys with a psychometric scale, multivariate statistics and participatory GIS.
Work package 2
WP2 aims to identify and characterise archetypes of telecoupling of NCP co-production through content analysis, surveys, GIS, multivariate regressions hierarchical cluster analysis.
Work package 3
WP3 will disentangle the relations between telecoupling archetypes, values, NCP, co-production and land-use intensity through a clustered heat map analysis.
Goals
The project aims to understand how power moments emerge and unfold in conservation initiatives and how they can be reshaped through reflexive practice. It asks how actors involved in conservation can critically reflect on their own roles, assumptions, and relationships, and how such reflection can support fairer and more effective forms of collaboration.
More specifically, the project seeks to identify and analyze power moments in conservation practice, explore how different actors experience and respond to them, and examine how reflexive approaches can help transform these moments in more equitable ways. In doing so, the project contributes to the wider goals of POWERSHIFT by offering a focused perspective on power, collaboration, and transformation in conservation.
Who is involved?
Ass. Prof. Dr. Jacqueline Loos
Project lead
Contact
University of Vienna
The project brings together a divers team of international researchers from a wide range of backgrounds.
Overview
Reshaping Power Moments in through Reflexive Practice is a research project embedded in the broader international project POWERSHIFT. While POWERSHIFT explores how power shapes transdisciplinary sustainability research across different contexts, this project focuses specifically on power moments in conservation initiatives. It examines how power becomes visible in key moments of collaboration and decision making, and how reflexive practice can help make these moments more just, inclusive, and constructive.
Duration
01.04.2026 - 30.03.29
Project location
Austria
Tanzania
Ongoing
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