Ideas About Biocentrism: Developments Across Space and Time

Voiceover

Presenter(s)

Ilana Amaria

Abstract or Description

The present geological era is referred to as the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humankind has emerged as a topographical force. Economic growth and concomitant consumerism largely cause the anthropocenic destruction of nature, exploitation of wildlife, and marginalization of its intrinsic value. Synthesizing the voices of prominent ideational thinkers, this project pivots around one central question: Why, in the age of human dominion, is emphasis placed on wildlife preservation? 

Mark Blyth analyzes the recent turn to ideas in political discourse as a response to the limits of rational choice theory and the tendency of research to orient around change rather than stasis. More narrowly, Martha Finnemore questions why states intervene in fields where there is little material payoff. Within an ideational paradigm, intervention becomes more explicable as a reaction to the increasing power of norms and ideas than to rationalist cost-benefit analyses. 

When superimposing preservation narratives onto this schema, two inextricable lines of questioning emerge. First, how have ideas about preservation developed in response to an evolving institutional landscape? And second, how successfully have these ideas changed discourse and the policymaking process? Strikingly, ideas serve both as the explanation and the very thing to be explained, simultaneously an answer and a question. 

Because ideational institutionalism is a newer field in political science, much ground is left unexplored. In aid of this lacuna, this project will harness the explanatory power of comparative politics, empirical notions of conservation progress, and the theoretical framework of ideational institutionalism to answer how ideas about conservation are embedded in institutions, when and how this process occurred, and what challenges this development faces. Highlighting such concepts as ordered change, discursive patterns, and actor agency, this project seeks a nuanced understanding of ideas and institutions through a comparison of wildlife protection efforts in the United States and Germany.