Beyond participation: How to achieve the recognition of local communities’ value-systems in conservation? Some insights from Mexico

1. In this article, we explore why conservation schemes that have positive outcomes through the participation of local communities cannot necessarily be deemed as just. We observe that recognition (understood as inclusion and respect) of local communities’ value-systems, a key factor towards environmental justice, is not often achieved in conservation governance. 2. We build our argument on the authors’ extensive research on four Mexican forest areas and contrast our insights with the literature on environmental justice and conservation. All four cases are characterised by positive conservation outcomes as well as the inclusion of local communities in conservation governance, and as such are typically considered best-practice conservation initiatives in Mexico. Yet, in all cases, our engagement with local community members leads us to believe that their value-systems fail to be recognised in conservation governance. 3. Three main factors appear to hinder recognition: (a) the dominant knowledge-system underpinning conservation action prevails in legal frameworks; (b) financial resources heavily determine power relations in decision-making, and (c) a lack of sensitiveness to local cultural norms affects local stakeholders’ capacity to communicate with external actors that design and implement conservation action. 4. We conclude that achieving meaningful recognition of local communities’ value-systems requires: (a) developing awareness of the structural political and economic factors impacting on decision-making in conservation, and (b) an epistemological


| INTRODUC TI ON
Global conservation goals can only be achieved through the involvement of local communities (Berkes, 2004;Brondizio & Le Tourneau, 2016;Brown, 2003): inclusive decision-making can help harness local knowledge-systems and foster worldviews associated with ethics of responsibility and care for nature, two leverage points with disproportionately large effects towards more sustainable futures Díaz et al., 2019). Indigenous people, for instance, protect at least 25% of the global land surface as a result of their diverse stewardship practices (Garnett et al., 2018;Lyver et al., 2019). Meaningful participation of local communities in decisionmaking can enable the development of environmental management strategies that are adapted to the local context and culture, and that addresses intertwined socio-ecological goals Díaz et al., 2019). The imposition of globally dominant conservation discourses to locally specific contexts can thus be detrimental to the protection of nature (Allen, 2018). Many scholars have called for the participation of local communities in the design and implementation of conservation programmes, not only to enhance conservation effectiveness (Apgar et al., 2009;Tengö et al., 2014), but also to respect local communities' rights, interests and perspectives (Adams & Hutton, 2007;Kothari et al., 2013) and to create fair decisionmaking spaces (Martin et al., 2015;Schreckenberg et al., 2016).
Notwithstanding, in many cases conservation initiatives (including those with a participatory component) still tend to impose external worldviews and narratives about conservation on local communities (Durand et al., 2014;Myers et al., 2018), which local communities themselves perceive as a form of injustice (Lecuyer et al., 2018).
In this article, we explore the factors that hinder the recognition of the value-systems of local communities that are involved in conservation initiatives. We build our argument from the experiences of five co-authors conducting research on different aspects of conservation 1 governance in four forest areas of Mexico. Some of this research is published elsewhere (see: Flores-Díaz et al., 2018;García-Frapolli et al., 2013;Gerritsen, 2002;Sierra-Huelsz et al., 2017). The information therein has entailed reviews of secondary sources, including policy documents and archives, interviews with diverse local and external actors as well as participant observations during multiple years in the four sites. While our engagement in these cases initially emerged from a concern for conservation and sustainable management of forest resources, we grew aware that conservation action can create or entrench injustices. We decided to collaboratively write this perspective to reflect on issues of injustices as we experienced them in our four places of research. Our perspective has been developed through iterative self-reflection and sharing of key case-specific insights towards building a common coherent view, but not necessarily through a formal analytical method. We have taken into consideration the wealth of qualitative and quantitative information gathered over time in the four cases and we have contrasted the insights from the field with the literature on conservation and justice. Our direct experiences in the four cases has allowed us to collectively reflect on the participatory processes within the different conservation governance approaches, and relate this to the observed positive impacts on conservation outcomes. While participation has had a positive impact on conservation outcomes, our engagement though multiple conversations with community members in the four sites and first hand observations of conservation governance processes over the years, leads us to believe that the participatory processes fall short from a genuine recognition of local communities' value-systems. We thus posit that the conservation schemes that have positive outcomes through the participation of local communities cannot be necessarily viewed as just, from a recognition angle. In this perspective, we explore why we think participatory processes in conservation governance in Mexico may grossly fail to recognise local communities' value-systems, and the implications this has for achieving environmental justice 2 in conservation.

| The recognition dimension of environmental justice
Conservation is a socio-political act (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019;Vucetich et al., 2018). In order to design and implement conservation programmes, certain visions of nature and its importance for society are imposed over others, often affecting local livelihoods (Suiseeya, 2017). The globally dominant conservation approach is generally shaped by Western views about nature, where conservation tends to be seen as achievable by restricting and even prohibiting human activities in what are perceived to be 'pristine' landscapes (Shafer, 2015). This rationale often leads conservation actors to promote the spatial segregation of biodiversity conservation from other activities (Phalan et al., 2011), which generally results in the displacement of communities from their territories transformation, permeating conservation governance, in which local communities' value-systems are considered one of various legitimate knowledge-systems.

K E Y W O R D S
conservation, environmental justice, epistemology, forests, governance, power, values of nature (Hawken & Granoff, 2010) and the breakdown of local and traditional institutions (Ostrom, 1999). In fact, limiting human activities in conservation areas can profoundly affect traditional management systems combining conservation, agriculture and forestry on the same land, despite evidence showing that such traditional systems can and have contributed to biodiversity conservation over many generations (Perfecto & Vandermeer, 2010;Porter-Bolland et al., 2012).
The imposition of globally defined conservation practices and their impact on self-determination rights has prompted calls for justice centred around the concept of recognition, referring to the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of social groups' culture and identities, and their respect in decision-making processes (Fraser, 2018;Martin et al., 2016;Whyte, 2011). In this vein, recognition implies both the respect for cultural diversity, collective decision-making institutions, and the rights of local communities to practice such cultural diversity, that is, to act in accordance with their values in environmental management (Schreckenberg et al., 2016). 3

| The recognition of local communities' valuesystems
An important object of recognition is local communities' valuesystems. Value-systems are here understood as 'sets of values according to which people, societies and organisations regulate their behaviour' . Of particular importance in the conservation realm are environmental values, defined as 'beliefs about the significance, importance, and well-being of the natural environment, and how the natural world should be viewed and treated' (Reser & Bentrupperbäumer, 2005, p. 141).
Value-systems are composed of worldviews, knowledge-systems and related practices inherent to social groups (and their culture), which in turn determine human-nature relations (Barrera-Bassols & Toledo, 2005;Merçon et al., 2019). Take, for instance, the traditional agrarian system of the milpa, the swidden (slash-and-burn) corn-based polyculture that has been central to Mayan livelihoods for centuries (Levy-Tacher & Hernández-Xolocotzi, 1992). The practice of the milpa is guided by a locally developed knowledge-system, based on direct experience in the land, and shaped by the Mayan worldview or cosmology. Mayans consider themselves to be part of nature (which is itself a spiritual entity): the Mayan word for 'soil' encompasses the land, vegetation, animals and humans that inhabit it, and the deities representing the land. Such vision of the land translates into integrated management practices, as soil health becomes inseparable from the health of the living entities inhabiting the land, including humans (Barrera-Bassols & Toledo, 2005).
As this example shows, the three components of value-systems are interrelated: experiential knowledge is embedded in worldviews and is reflected in locally specific human practices (Berkes et al., 2000). Knowledge, worldviews and practices have also been identified as central objects of recognition by environmental activists (Schlosberg, 2004).
Relational values (environmental values that denote a relation between humans and nature; Chan et al., 2018) are at the core of local communities' value-systems. As the Mayan example shows, worldviews are embedded in land management practices and are reflected in an embodied knowledge of nature. In contrast, the globally dominant discourses about nature and conservation have favoured western interpretation of intrinsic and instrumental values of nature. 4 Relational values, as interpreted by local communities, can enable harmonious human-nature relations, including relations of care and stewardship (Klain et al., 2017). Thus, emphasising the recognition of relational values that compose local communities' value-systems can contribute to environmental justice (Himes & Muraca, 2018), and foster sustainability pathways (Datta, 2015;Jax et al., 2018;Timoti et al., 2017).

| Recognition and procedural justice
Recognition is a crucial yet under-researched dimension of environmental justice literature, which tends to be conflated with procedural justice . This obscures the importance of recognition and the barriers to achieve it. Local communities' ability to relate to nature in a way that is congruent with their valuesystems depends on their recognition in collective decision-making.
At the local level, conservation decisions are affected by a range of interacting factors including power relations (Durand, 2019;Pinkerton, 2019) and cultural norms (Peterson et al., 2010;Roncoli et al., 2011;Teitelbaum et al., 2019). Decision-making processes about conservation are also embedded in a given symbolic context (Taddei, 2011) and epistemology (Vermeylen, 2019). Finally, other structural factors including laws and policies embedded in national history also affect conservation action (Carías Vega, 2019).
Blind to this complexity, the conservation literature has tended to analytically subsume recognition under the umbrella of 'procedural justice', which refers to 'inclusion, representation and participation in decision-making' (McDermott et al., 2013, p. 419). The assumption that recognition necessarily results from adequate decision-making procedures is problematic for three reasons. First, most studies about conservation and procedural justice focus on the implementation stage of conservation programmes (Friedman, 2018). This can obscure the absence of prior consultation with local stakeholders about the pertinence of the programme's core assumptions or its existence. For instance, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programmes tend to promote participation in its operationalisation stage, but fail to provide space for the discussion of the value-system underpinning the programme itself and its implications for people and nature (Martin, 2017;Myers et al., 2018). Achieving the recognition of value-systems thus requires looking beyond participation during the implementation of conservation programmes, tackling the entire process of decisionmaking instead (Massarella et al., 2020).
Second, the choice of methodological tools used to monitor conservation action (e.g. indicators of reforestation) remains outside the scope of participation. 5 Although such tools are at times portrayed as objective due to their scientific backing, scientists recognise particular worldviews, ethical principles and assumptions are necessarily embedded within methodological tools (Kolinjivadi et al., 2017;Sikor et al., 2014). Thus, it is important that research on recognition addresses the values embedded in the knowledge production process that underlies conservation action.
Third, decision-making does not result from a linear application of a set of written rules-it is necessarily shaped by power relations between stakeholders (Ishihara et al., 2017). Powerful actors can impose their values through varied strategies (such as lobbying for influence, corruption or the use of violence; Ávila-García & Sánchez, 2012). Thus, exploring recognition requires going beyond the design of participatory schemes to understand how power affects decision-making processes. 6

| IN S I G HTS FROM CON S ERVATI ON INITIATIVE S OF FOUR ME XI C AN FORE S TS
Mexico boasts a high bio-cultural diversity (Loh & Harmon, 2005) and is a pioneer in community forestry schemes (Bray et al., 2003). Across social actors, disciplines, and ideological divides, there is consensus in Mexico that conservation depends on collaboration with local communities (Durand, 2017). Most of the country's protected areas combine conservation with sustainable use of natural resources (Pfaff et al., 2017). Still, much remains to be done to recognise the diverse value-systems of local communities (Gall, 2013), as cases of social conflicts related to conservation programmes suggest (Brenner, 2010;Legorreta-Díaz et al., 2014).
We analyse four cases of conservation that are seen as cases of best-practice in Mexico, both in terms of the inclusion of local communities via co-management and participatory mechanisms, and of positive conservation outcomes (see Table 1). The cases represent different socio-ecological contexts: Indigenous people are present in all cases, but it is not the primary identity of all local communities as a result of historical acculturation processes.
We reflect on the following question across each case: To what extent are local communities' value-systems recognised in conservation governance, and what factors hinder recognition? Results are presented below and summarised in Table 2.
We define local community as a social group bound by its spatiality and a shared culture, which does not preclude the coexistence of diverse interests within it (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999). This is a helpful concept to describe, in the context of the four cases, the owners and inhabitants of the land that is the object of conservation initiatives, who still share a value-system bound by a common culture, despite their relations with a broader social field which in time changes the dynamics of the community (Ojha et al., 2016). We are conscious that a limitation of this approach is the focus on the shared values among the community; this is a helpful approach to explore concerns of justice, but a necessary simplification of complex social phenomena (Li, 2002).

| The Community Water Monitoring Network (MBBR)
The Network was founded to address both local concerns for water quality and regional concerns over reforestation for conservation; diverse actors participate in it. National governmental environmental agencies participate and benefit from robust documentation of biodiversity habitat quality monitoring, which helps determining the local impacts of its environmental management strategies (such as ecotourism). An academic entity provides continuity and support to the systematising and analysing of the collected data. The Mexican Fund for the Nature Conservation has financed the Network's launch and the reserve's conservation activities, including PES schemes. Local communities are engaged in managing the network and in water quality monitoring activities.
Civil society organisations are members of the Network and put forward different objectives, from social justice to conservation.
Smaller organisations with a long-standing involvement with local communities foster conservation through working with communities and their value-systems. Local communities view water bodies as sacred entities, and use them for cultural and religious practices (for instance, a ritual involves washing the Virgin Mary's dress in a local spring); they are also interested in developing livelihoods (particularly for women) relating their culture to conservation activities (for instance, craftsmanship inspired by local ecosystems), thus seeking to reduce the pressure on the forest from tourism.
For these groups, the cultural and spiritual role of water is critical in making decisions around conservation. Other organisations, on the other hand, focus on environmental goals (such as reforestation) as their primary objective, and promote the use of technical environmental studies to document the Network's performance, emphasising the intrinsic value of water and its instrumental role in reaching conservation objectives through a Payment for Ecosystem services (PES) program.
Decision-making within the Network has been shaped by the power imbalance amongst its members, reflected in their participation in the Network activities and meetings. Governmental agencies, for instance, benefit from secure funding, strong technical and human resources, and play a role in many regional and national political fora.
Their opinions are heavily weighted in the decision-making process of the Network, perhaps because they facilitate civil society organisations' work (providing financial and political resources) and determine territorial delimitation, which is crucial for social actors' inclusion into a range of programmes. The potential to benefit from the political capital that results from being in good terms with a governmental agency can explain why civil society organisations push for decisions that may not be consulted with local communities, and thus fail to integrate communities' value-systems. On the contrary, they may refrain from speaking their mind during meetings in order to preserve a good relationship with actors who can facilitate access to funding.
The financial resources of each member of the Network also affects their power to influence local governance. As member organisations compete for external funding to develop activities within the Network, the organisations with more resources (in terms of financial and technical resources, and political capital) are those that systematically attract funding. These have the power to determine what activities take place within the Network and to lead such activities, making use of the strengths and capacities of all Networks' members.
Those who lack such funding see their role being diminished, which Participation in the management of the reserve is through deliberative platforms at state and community levels (INE, 2000) that collaboratively make decisions for the reserve. Two advisory boards (one for Colima, one for Jalisco) are composed of community and regional leaders, as well as regional, state and federal governmental institutions. Community institutions also play a role in strengthening participatory processes: the directive board of every peasant community identifies the priorities of landholding peasants and acts as an intermediary with the regional advisory boards limits their capacity to influence the Network's overall objective or vision-this is even the case for the organisation currently coordinating the Network, which fails to participate in all activities due to a lack of own funds. For instance, the Network is supporting the creation of a Management Plan for a local water basin, an effort which is led by the bigger member organisation. This bigger organisation has staff dedicated to seeking funds and receives the support of regional and international organisations. It has used these resources to organise participatory workshops. Thus, it takes on a leading role, while other members of the Network become one among many actors in such participatory exercises. The values they hold which happen to differ from those of that bigger organisation (such as the cultural value of water, or supporting women groups in developing livelihoods activities), tend not to be reflected in decision-making which focuses exclusively on the environmental performance of the Network.

| Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve (SMBR)
Both the worldviews held by farmers and professional managers of the reserve shape the management of the SMBR (Gerritsen, 2002;Gerritsen et al., 2017). Both groups also appreciate the value of biodiversity and the need to combine biodiversity conservation actions with livelihood improvements (Gerritsen & Wiersum, 2005); however, the means to reach these goals are shaped by distinct value-systems and consequent natural resource management practices.

| Zona Maya
In the Zona Maya, community forestry is practiced alongside the milpa, characterised by cyclical agriculture alternating felling forest, agricultural crops cultivation (2-3 years), and a longer period of forest regeneration. Yet, some aspects of this traditional milpa management have gradually been hindered by the forestry regulation.
Community forestry started in 1986 with the Forestry Pilot Plan (PPF) requiring each ejido's assembly to demarcate two areas: one for agriculture and another as Permanent Forest Area (off-limits for agricultural use) in an attempt to halt deforestation (Ellis et al., 2015). Such zoning was largely accepted at the time, as most communities still had enough land for agriculture (Hajjar et al., 2013).

| Tesoco Nuevo
Tesoco Although there has been an interest (from governmental and non-governmental organisations alike) in incorporating local people's visions through participatory exercises, such exercises, in practice, leave no room for major changes. In the case of PES in Tesoco Nuevo, the prohibition of activities in the conservation areas is outside the scope of the discussion held through participatory exercises, which focus instead on details of the implementation. In addition, the format of these exercises tends to ignore the local cultural contexts, which hinders the expression of different opinions and values by local actors. For instance, these meetings are held in Spanish, a language not spoken fluently by all community members. Thus, both the format and the content of the participatory exercises are unable to integrate the value-system of local people.

| FAC TOR S AFFEC TING RECOG NITI ON OF VALUE-SYS TEMS IN CONS ERVATION GOVERNAN CE
We observe that in the four cases, local communities' value-systems fail to be recognised in collective decision-making, which affects local practices related to conservation. In the MBBR, the debates within participatory fora are of a technical nature, oriented towards quantitative measures of water quality. This hinders local communities to discuss the spiritual importance of water and its relation to the local worldview. In the SMBR, the promoted practices of envi-  Durand et al., 2014;Lecuyer et al., 2018) and elsewhere (Dawson et al., 2018), and suggests that the recognition of local communities' value-systems is still not universally achieved, even in conservation initiatives which uphold good practices of inclusive governance.
The question that follows thus is, what factors hinder the recognition of local communities' value-systems? Although the specific configuration of environmental governance is distinct in each case, we identify three recurrent factors across the presented cases, which also echo some key insights from the environmental justice and conservation literature: (a) legal frameworks play a crucial role in legitimising the dominant knowledge-system underpinning conservation action; (b) financial resources are a key mediating factor determining power relations in decision-making processes (and therefore whose worldview shapes collective conservation practice) and (c) a lack of sensitiveness to local cultural norms affects local stakeholders' capacity to communicate and share both their worldviews and knowledge-systems with other actors that design and implement conservation action.

| Legal and regulatory frameworks are shaped by the conventional scientific paradigm
The

| Skewed distribution of financial resources enhance power asymmetries in decision-making
Powerful actors can impose their value-systems by setting the agenda and shaping collective decision-making processes (Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016;Ishihara et al., 2017;Martin, 2017). We see

| Cultural norms affect collective decisionmaking
In Tesoco Nuevo, we have observed that local communities' participation in collective decision-making is restricted to the participatory exercises organised by the national and foreign organisations fostering the conservation schemes in the area. Such exercises appear to ignore the local communication culture (including ways of relating to other people, gender relations, and the language spoken) and concerns (as the exercises focus solely on the implementation phase of conservation initiatives). This hinders participants' ability to efficiently speak their mind, despite them being present during participatory exercises, and having local actors hired to act as intermediaries between the international organisations and the local community. Language and social norms play a role in determining the outcomes of collective decisionmaking processes (Peterson et al., 2010;Roncoli et al., 2011). The insensitiveness to cultural norms appears to be inseparable from the country's history of racism in the creation of the modern state (Saldívar, 2018)-perspective we have not explored in-depth in this work. Future research is needed to analyse the legacy of the political history of Mexico (and elsewhere) and how it shapes the governance of contemporary conservation efforts.

| CON CLUS ION
The acknowledgement of the role of local communities in conservation has led to their increased involvement in conservation initiatives (often based on processes designed by external actors) and to harnessing local communities' relational values to foster desired conservation outcomes. Yet, despite progress in achieving inclusive participation processes with local actors in conservation, and an increased concern for environmental justice within the conservation community, our collective insights based on four cases of conservation in Mexico suggest that local actors' value-systems still fail to be recognised in conservation practice. This observation of the shortcomings of conservation practice to achieve environmental justice is not new. Over 15 years ago, Brown (2003) already called for a fundamental change in conservation practice by moving towards just conservation-she identified a better understanding of people's values and knowledge-systems and their integration in decision-making as crucial steps towards this overarching goal. Brown's claims resonate with our cases of contemporary conservation practice in Mexico. Our field research and experience of these cases leads us to conclude that injustices in the conservation realm may persist even in cases which represent conservation best-practice, both in terms of inclusive governance and conservation outcomes.
We contend that achieving environmental justice in conservation requires profound changes to conservation practice that must go beyond efforts to enhance participation of local actors, as meaningful recognition is not a necessary consequence of participatory processes in conservation . Our insights suggest that recognition of local communities' value-systems requires acknowledging and respecting local communities' worldviews, interests and knowledgesystems. Our perspective points towards structural barriers for genuine recognition, such as the legal framework and power asymmetries across actors, which pertain to the broad political and economic structures within which conservation practice operates. We argue that achieving environmental justice in conservation requires not turning a blind eye to the broader political, historical and epistemic structures within which this practice is embedded.
Two avenues may bring forward the required profound changes in conservation practice. The first one is an epistemological transformation in which experiential knowledge is considered on equal grounds with scientific knowledge (as proposed by Elgert, 2010).
To this end, we think that the ideal of 'evidence-based policy' informed by a neutral scientific process ought to be replaced by a deliberative process where politics are tackled explicitly (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019), and where local communities' relationships with nature are seen as the basis of the legitimacy of their knowledgesystem. Achieving the legitimacy of local knowledge is a necessary step towards recognising local communities' value-systems, and therefore the inclusion of their worldviews and practices into conservation efforts.
The second condition to co-construct conservation initiatives which consider local communities' aspirations is to develop awareness of the role of the socio-cultural context (including power configurations) in participatory mechanisms. Asymmetric power relations can be addressed head on, for instance by learning from experience in collaborative planning, which has developed approaches for developing empathy and respect as a basis for envisioning shared solutions among groups with power differentials through dialogue (Innes & Booher, 2010). Other experiences on which to draw on may involve those connected to the idea of 'knowledges dialogues' in transdisciplinary action (de Oliveira Cunha & Floriani, 2019;Delgado & Rist, 2016). Recognising and giving space for the expression of relational values should also be at the core of these discussions, as they hold the potential for conservation pathways which are respectful of cultural diversity and further human well-being.

ACK N OWLED G EM ENTS
We thank the anonymous reviewers, Marc Tadaki   ence or valuation. Instrumental value is that attributed to something as a means to achieve a particular end .
5 For a discussion of the involvement of local communities in monitoring processes, (see Wells et al., 2017). 6 The limited role of participatory processes to achieve justice in decision-making resonates beyond the conservation realm: development scholars (Cooke & Kothari, 2001;Gaventa & Cornwall, 2006), planners (Brownill & Inch, 2019) and anthropologists (Boccara & Bolados, 2008) have documented for the past two decades how participation, far from enhancing democratic decision-making, reproduces instead existing power inequalities.
7 This occurs despite the promotion of indigenous and traditional knowledge as a principle in the 1997 forest law (DOF, 2018), that has been expanded in later laws (Sierra-Huelsz et al., 2020).