Research Group - Valerie Hickey
Currently a Soros Fellow, my research focuses on two broad themes:
1. Measuring the success of protected area management.
Viewing biodiversity as a portfolio of natural assets, conservation
can be thought of as the business of managing that portfolio.
Thus while an inventory of assets is essential to goal definition
– and is widely performed by a variety of actors – so too is
measurement of the portfolio’s losses and gains essential to
underscore society’s return on its investment in conservation
and provide a basis for efficiency trade-offs with other social
and environmental priorities. My research involves crafting a
metric for success that is convenient and comparable in protected
areas whose primary goal is biodiversity conservation. This metric
will integrate information from, among others, spatial analyses,
species counts, and environmental quality indicators. I also
plan to correlate spending patterns in these areas with the metric
to identify which investments provide the biggest bang for the
conservation buck, and hence pinpoint exactly how much loss is
avoided per dollar spent in each area.
2. Dissecting the conservation ideology.
The environment is a contested ideology: contested are the nature
and the gravity of the problems facing our planet, as well as
the equity and cost of possible solutions. Underlying these conflicts
are broader societal dynamics that trigger these opposing perspectives,
nurtured by a Manichean debate between divergent world views,
one catastrophist, the other cornucopian. My research investigates
the defining and boundary systems currently adopted by the biodiversity
conservation community – currently articulating a struggle using
language borrowed from religion, genuine social protest, and
economics – to consider whether it is and should be these things,
or whether it should simply be based on the need to end the pathology
of extinction, not for any greater purpose, but for its own sake.
This involves looking at examples of strategies used by the conservation
community to enact conservation, including integrated conservation
and development programs and payments for environmental services,
and examining their success. My research also focuses on the
importance of communicating the importance of biodiversity conservation
within a framework that acknowledges the broader cosmology of
a particular place, people and time. This involves exploring
the dual rhetorics of rationality and rectitude, and their fusion
as sustainable development, and their effectiveness in creating
an environment to foster biodiversity conservation.
Prior to coming to Duke, I worked as a biodiversity specialist at the World Bank, focusing on biodiversity projects in general, and protected area management projects in East Asia more specifically. Before that, I worked at both the Wildlife Conservation Society and USAID’s Biodiversity Support Program. Trained as a political scientist focusing on environmental problem solving, because I believe that while science can provide the alternative – conserve rather than convert – only politics can provide the means and the motivation to enact that alternative, I have a BA in History and Political Science from Trinity College, Ireland, and an MA in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame.