Colonialism in Community-Based Monitoring: Knowledge Systems, Finance, and Power in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community-based monitoring (CBM) programs are increasingly popular models of environmental governance around the world. Accordingly, a handful of review papers have highlighted the various benefits, challenges, and governance models associated with their uptake. These reviews have been pragmatic in their recommendations and have supported CBM scholars and practitioners in implementing and understanding the various possible forms of CBM, but they have largely been silent on issues around the power dynamics implicit in CBM. Structured around explorations of the colonial politics of knowledge, funding, and finance, this article argues that dominant knowledge systems—specifically those that underpin Western, colonial governments and liberal, capitalist economies—shape the provisioning of funding for local programs and determine the significance of different types of community observations in shaping management decisions. To make this argument, we situate our work at the intersection of political economy and knowledge systems, using theoretical insights and empirical examples to show that funding and finance are key sources of power in shaping CBM programs. These are important insights because CBM is often framed as a purely scientific—and therefore politically neutral—activity. Through this work, we explore questions of intellectual property, histories of institutional exclusion and the privileging of certain knowledge systems, and the relationships of trust and mistrust across different groups and authorities, with the aim of stimulating critical discussions on the power relationships in CBM that will be useful to scholars and practitioners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".