Emergence, exclusion, and unresolved horizons: Response to Bunce et al. (2025)

Abstract

Bunce et al.’s (2025) “A Social Network Analysis of an Epistemic Community Studying Neoliberal Conservation” is a welcome and overdue contribution to the maturing and diversifying field of interdisciplinary inquiry and critique. Whereas these scholars sought to map an epistemic community in ways that support coordination across epistemic difference to enhance conservation outcomes, I take a different tack in this commentary by foregrounding the unresolved tensions, exclusions, and emergent dynamics through which the field has taken shape and that continue to condition the kinds of knowledge and transformation it facilitates and forecloses.

As someone present in the early days of this epistemic community, I particularly appreciate how Bunce et al.’s analysis opens space through which to revisit the ways the field first emerged and to consider the horizons toward which it might still be oriented. I approached these possibilities in terms of emergence—the formative dynamics through which fields coalesce—and horizons—the relationships and possibilities that shape and exceed its formations. These concepts can help us reconsider what Bunce et al. frame as underdeveloped collaborative potential in terms of ongoing expressions of formative tensions and unresolved dynamics that continue to shape the field's possibilities.

Early realization of neoliberal conservation critique in the mid-2000s, as Bunce et al. thoroughly outline, was shaped by acute awareness of the very dynamics they analyze—hierarchies, exclusions, and uneven distribution of authority. These concerns were intensified by critical scrutiny of large conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their complicity in displacement and dispossession. Notable among these was Mac Chapin's (2004) seismic essay “A Challenge to Conservationists,” which catalyzed significant public commentary and, in doing so, fostered mutual recognition and collaboration among previously isolated critics.

As critiques of neoliberal conservation gained traction, a number of us involved in this early work—including scholars, community-based conservation workers, and community representatives—articulated a strong commitment to doing things differently. This included foregrounding relational accountability, broadening participation, and refusing the gatekeeping practices then entrenched in major conservation organizations and increasingly carried over in academic spaces and professional conferences. These commitments informed how we convened, collaborated, and circulated knowledge (for an extensively documented example, see Igoe & Sullivan [2009]). However, such intentions were unevenly enacted and subject to pressures of institutional survival, career advancement, and intellectual consolidation. What Bunce et al. present as a distributed and evolving epistemic community reflects patterned interactions and institutional realignments that narrowed participation and consolidated narrative authority through rituals of convening and recognition, which many found exclusionary and constraining.

Over time, these uneven enactments and intensifying pressures gave way to relatively durable patterns, with the early 2010s marking the key moment of their consolidation. During this period, some scholars who had been instrumental in articulating the foundational critique of neoliberal conservation and shaping its early contours were quietly displaced. Others stepped forward into newly visible roles, advancing essential arguments and insights from earlier work in ways more closely aligned with institutional agendas and platforms of recognition. Around this time, more formalized and recognizable research initiatives began to emerge that drew on elements of the foundational critique and reshaped them through institutional alignments, branded framings, and targeted agendas. These consolidations are vividly reflected in Bunce et al.’s analytical diagrams, although what they render visible and what remains obscured warrant closer examination.

Bunce et al.’s diagrams compellingly depict how the field has coalesced around identifiable clusters of scholars, citations, and affiliations. Their mapping is focused, rigorous, and—given the field's trajectory—overdue. However, their attention to the field's current architecture elides how that architecture was built, who was excluded in the process, and what was compromised along the way. In privileging what can be visually mapped and quantitatively measured, their analysis centers hierarchy while obscuring the field's broader horizons—accountability, community, and epistemic justice—even as they acknowledge their methodology may reproduce the very exclusions they aim to challenge (Bunce et al., 2025). This is less a matter of omission than one of orientation: it's a structural snapshot that maps the visible present while missing the contingent openings and relational commitments through which alternative futures have tantalizingly come into view and occasionally been contingently realized.

A more horizon-oriented analysis might have drawn on relevant precedents from other fields, where network methods have been deployed not just to map intellectual patterns but also to expose entrenched exclusions and advocate transformation. The Hau journal scandal of 2017–2018, for instance, marked a high-profile moment of epistemic reckoning in anthropology that was catalyzed by critiques from Indigenous and feminist scholars and amplified by collective dissent. Amid this reckoning, then-master's student Jules Weiss used social network analysis to reveal the ways Hau's publication archive concentrated authority within a narrow group—predominantly White, male, and Global North based—despite the journal's open-access, decolonial aspirations. Weiss's (2018) essay, “Citation is a Gift,” exemplified how mapping relationships can serve as a tool for disruption rather than consolidation—foregrounding accountability, inviting reflection, and calling forth other ways of organizing scholarly community.

Compared with Weiss's intervention, Bunce et al.’s diagrams offer a more tempered and ostensibly objective account of the field's current configuration—one that gestures toward critique without substantively engaging a broader politics of knowledge and its horizons of transformation. Their methodological emphasis on established power structures risks overlooking potentially emergent dynamics that could tell a different story—one in which a wider multiplicity of human and more-than-human voices and approaches take root early on, perhaps transforming the very assumptions of the field. Toward the end of their article, however, their engagement with feminist theory—beyond mere inclusion—provides glimpses of the transformative potential of the field's broader horizons, extending them beyond the human (Bunce et al., 2025, p. 15). In that spirit, I would like to ask, how might we more clearly discern the ways a field is taking shape in order to participate responsibly and effectively in its unfolding?

This question is grounded in a fundamentally practical concern—one that animated cultural studies in its most strategically minded moments. That field, especially the works of Stuart Hall, was centrally concerned with understanding how fields form, fracture, and become sites of potentially transformative struggle. For Hall, conjuncture names those moments when social, political, and ideological contradictions condense to produce a distinctive historical configuration ripe for intervention and transformation. Navigating conjuncture is less about mapping than strategic orientation to “history in motion” (Hall & Massey, 2010). It entails rigorously clarifying what is at stake in a particular moment (Scott, 2005) to realize the political imperative of acting opportunely within, against, and through unfolding contradictions (Gilbert, 2019).

The emergence of neoliberal conservation and its subsequent critique around the turn of the millennium marked a moment of conjuncture, in Hall's terms, during which profound contradictions became starkly visible, provoking urgent critique and sustained debate. At its core was the growing visibility of two fundamentally incompatible imperatives drawn together through the logic of neoliberal environmental governance: growing the economy and saving the planet. Meanwhile, mainstream conservation was expanding its financial base and political influence—deepening its entanglements with state and corporate actors—while coming into intensifying conflict with a globalizing Indigenous peoples’ movement. Tensions and potential transformations were palpable.Indigenous leaders called out conservationists for neocolonialism at the 2003 World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa (Brosius, 2004). Mac Chapin's (2004) insider exposé provoked a wave of responses from conservation NGOs and sent ripples of consternation through the conservation world, including the 2004 World Conservation Congress in Bangkok, Thailand.

This moment was most acutely felt in the messy and overlapping dynamics through which critique and field formation unfolded simultaneously. The object of analysis—neoliberal conservation—and the epistemic community studying it could not easily be disentangled. Some early-career scholars found themselves singled out and silenced just as they were gaining momentum—disciplined by their advisors and senior colleagues and sometimes experiencing direct pressure from conservation NGOs (Igoe & Sullivan, 2009; Koot et al., 2025). Meanwhile, some senior scholars were busily building and consolidating research networks with institutional actors from the conservation world. At the same time, figures such as Mac Chapin upended the terrain entirely, whereas Indigenous intellectuals underscored the persistent disregard for their leadership and knowledge. Contradictions were unfolding in real time, stakes were high, and the lines of alignment and antagonism were still in motion.

By contrast, the contemporary field diagrammed by Bunce et al.—especially in figure 3—appears so densely stable that it is difficult to imagine it registering emergent shifts or disruptions as anything other than external noise. It also does not readily capture durable patterns of relationship that emerged with the version of the field that their methodology defines, but which now appear outside of its analytical frame. For example, the kinds of structured epistemic violence articulated by Koot et al. (2025) (in the same special issue of Conservation Biology) had an ambient quality in the conjunctural moment described above and were often felt as individuated and anomalous. It was difficult for its victims to recognize one another amid the entangled relationships and unsettled positions through which it moved. As they did, they began to identify common patterns and articulate them collectively. However, it was some time before these could be framed according to the bounded domains taken for granted in analyses today, and epistemic violence was accordingly conceived by scholars as a structural force acting on a scholarly field.

The possibility of rendering a coherent epistemic community and its associated fields in these bounded terms emerged only after these dynamics had, to some extent, settled—once key tensions had been displaced, certain voices consolidated, and other voices moved to the margins. Yet, even as the field congealed into more stable forms, new social movements continued to trouble its assumptions and expand its horizons, including networked efforts to redress continuing forms of conservation dispossession, amplify Indigenous sovereignty, and decolonize the terms of knowledge production. Among these was the emergence of initiatives like Our Land, Our Nature (Dawson et al., 2023), which engaged and decentered academic critiques, challenging complacencies that had settled in the field, even while contending with the contradictions accompanying their own formations and strategies. Such movements remind us that critique of neoliberal conservation was never just about conservation or fully contained within academic spaces. They also unsettle the conditions under which critique becomes legible, as well as what kinds of alliances, epistemologies, and transformations are imaginable from a field-oriented perspective.

Although Bunce et al. note that neoliberal conservation critique has often sidestepped questions of coloniality, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental justice, they leave the deeper implications of this neglect largely unexplored. Yet, the omissions they name point to a deeper problem: a field focused on power and exclusion remains curiously adjacent to movements and analytic traditions that most directly confront conservation's violent effects. This disconnect hews to the institutional paths along which critique has consolidated—paths leading primarily to elite academic and policy spaces while bypassing those most affected by the realities being critiqued. Although inclusive writing collaborations and decolonizing citations help mitigate some of this path-worn legacy, as Bunce et al. suggest, the question of how to realign the field's priorities with the broader struggles that gave rise to its concerns remains a collective challenge.

Such questions gain heightened significance amid rising global illiberalism, where struggles over land, environment, and knowledge are shaped by authoritarian retrenchment and antidemocratic force. In this context, Bunce et al.’s intervention is not only overdue but also timely. It reopens questions of hierarchy, affiliation, and influence at a moment when clarity, responsibility, and historical awareness matter more than ever. What remains is to consider not just how the field has taken shape but also how it might still be reshaped by those who resist its closures and related epistemic violence as they work—within, against, and beyond it—in ways that advance the unfinished work of critique and transformative praxis.