The Lemmings Dilemma: An Examination of Environmental Justice, Volunteerism, and the Pursuit of Empowerment in Biodiversity Conservation Organizations in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Within the conservation social sciences, the metaphor of pathologies offers a perspective for examining the factors that contribute to the success and failure of biodiversity conservation initiatives. This article explores lessons from community engagement and engagement design within citizen and community science projects and programs. The goal is to learn from these contexts so as to better understand the pathology of ineffective engagement within the broader field of conservation science and practice. Methods: Findings stem from semi-structured interviews with 16 project and program staff and coordinators representing 11 citizens and community science programs. Projects and programs were selected for their focus on biodiversity conservation. Staff and coordinators were recruited because they had direct experience working with volunteers. Interviews were thematically analyzed followed by Charmaz’s grounded theory approach. Results: Findings relate to two themes. The first theme explores staff and coordinators’ intentions and strategies to promote codesign and coproduction with the community. These efforts stem from a goal to ensure volunteers have a meaningful experience beyond tasks specific to data collection. The second theme links meaningful experiences to structural, particularly demographic, challenges related to volunteer recruitment and retention. Staff and coordinators report partnerships with postsecondary institutions as a desired strategy to overcome recruitment and retention issues. Discussion and Conclusion: Discussion of findings adds context from the scholarship on university–community partnerships. While acknowledging the many potential benefits of partnership, the article explores potential issues related to structural differences in power and possibly incongruent cultures of knowledge production.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.063 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".