ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how public participation in biodiversity conservation interacts with scientific narratives to constrain possibilities for community-based conservation, and also to identify ways that different forms of expertise come together around an environmental issue. It summarizes conceptual framework which is centred on relationships between scientific expertise and opportunities for community participation in policy development and implementation. In science and technology studies (STS) literature, scientific knowledge generally is assumed to be communicated and verified through three mutually informing and inextricable, yet different, processes: personal experience; social expertise; and knowledge about a subject, or subject expertise. Similarly to social expertise, subject expertise emerges both through interactions with other members of the community and through contributing new knowledge to the topic of conservation. Scientific communication of those practices, both internally and externally directed, is truncated for a variety of media that cannot fully express the process of knowledge building.
