Our project on Conservation, Markets and Justice explores conceptions of environmental justice as a means to understand the tensions between biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods of people in the tropics. It does so through a three-pronged methodological approach, including semi-structured surveys, experimental games and ethnographic studies (including participatory videos). This dataset includes a set of participatory videos, a participatory video photo story; a final report; a summary report of participatory video in the village of Ruhatwe and guidelines for ethnographic studies related to our project. This participatory video data is related to the other datasets as it forms part of a collection of research into local conceptions of environmental justice(see Related Resources).This research project will contribute to the challenge to reconcile forest conservation with social justice for local people in developing countries. To do so, the project will generate new empirical data about what social justice means to these local people and work with donors, NGOs and policy-makers to bring this new knowledge into practice. The project will conduct research in three countries, China, Tanzania and Venezuela. In each site we will research local conceptions of environmental justice, for example what different groups of local people consider to be the fairest way of making decisions about forest management options, and what they consider to be the fairest way of distributing the costs and benefits associated with any intervention. We will test for the presence of some well known principles of justice using surveys and experimental economic games. But we will also employ more open, ethnographic methods for a more inductive approach to identifying justice norms. In addition to comparisons across countries and across intervention type, we will compare local conceptions of justice with those that are evident in the conservation interventions in that particular site.

We have employed a variety of techniques to collect the data required by our conceptual framework: in-depth interviews, direct observation, informal conversations, key informant interviews, compilation of grey and published literature, focus groups discussions and collection of the video footage. When the country teams planned the data collection, two considerations were important. First, they kept a close eye on the feasibility of their plans considering the limited time and resources available. For this reason they made selective use of the suggested data collection techniques set out below. Second, prior to the use of footage from the participatory video projects they secured local people’s consent to the use of footage in the analysis. In addition, local people agreed that the researchers can use observations and informal conversations taking place during the video making in the ethnographic analysis. This was addressed explicitly when villagers’ consent is sought prior to the video projects.