Yolanda Ariadne Collins

Y Ariadne Collins is a Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Her work lies at the intersection of climate change governance, environmental policy and international development. More specifically, she analyses the interplay between market-based conservation and post-colonial development.

Ariadne was awarded a PhD (Summa cum laude) from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary in May, 2017. She holds a Masters in Research (Distinction) from the University of Westminster, London and a Bachelors from the University of Guyana. Prior to joining the University of St. Andrews, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin. She was also a visiting researcher at the Centre for Space, Place and Society at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Ariadne’s first book was published in March 2024 by University of California Press. The book, titled Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield, questions the effectiveness of market-based policies that govern forests in the interest of mitigating climate change.

The Earth is currently going through rapid change stemming from global warming and biodiversity decline. In 2022, parties to the COP15 UN biodiversity summit responded by agreeing to designate 30% of the planet, including terrestrial and extraterrestrial or off-land spaces, to varying degrees of protection by 2030 under an initiative called ‘30×30’. Proceeding from the assumption that extraterrestrial spaces need different modes of governance and conservation than do terrestrial ones, this project will question the extent to which ‘30×30’ is building on a colonially rooted ‘land bias’ by extending understandings of ecosystem function modelled on land to off-land spaces, such as the ocean and atmosphere.

In emerging critical debates on 30×30, there is little awareness of its likely underpinning land bias. Environmental policies formulated through an implicit land bias will, therefore, likely miss the ways in which extraterrestrial ecological dynamics challenge or destabilize anticipated policy outcomes. This project will take steps towards answering the following question, ‘How does paying explicit attention to the material and scalar dimensions of ecosystems challenge established and emergent strategies of environmental governance’?

Adopting the breadth of the term ‘environment’ outlined in the 2018-2020 ERRANS environ/s Fellowship, and being attentive to its focus on how environments can urge the questioning of clear-cut distinctions and ‘produce complex political ecologies attuned to far-reaching entanglements’, Collins’ project reaches into the historical environments of Guyana and Suriname to feel out and trace the legacy of the colonial encounter. She outlines how this legacy is reflected in the modern-day reliance on extractive activity, challenging environmental conservation efforts taking place there.

Through a focus on the societal structure founded on a layered and exploitative history, Collin uses the environment as a string of temporal continuity unreeling from an initial Indigenous and European encounter in the Guianas to establish entrenched societal structures and economic activity that challenge the feasibility of global climate change policies today. She will produce a monograph and supporting articles that connect these historical events with the challenges of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) forest conservation initiative being implemented in Guyana and Suriname.