Editing Nunavut polar bear monitoring and management

One of the ways in which the meanings and properties of scientific data are dis/continuously produced within Nunavut polar bear science derives from its nested entanglements with multiple national and international agreements on wildlife science, conservation and trade. Examples of these agreements are the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora CITES. As explained before, this nested system continues to consist of multiple interests that are often understood as in competition with one another (Clark et al., 2008). Importantly they also all rely on the same sources of data. Scientific data that is collected locally is thus not only expected to inform territorial harvest management decisions, but also to inform international conservation policy (Clark et al., 2023), -species (red)listing assessments (Regehr et al., 2016) and to counter climate change denial narratives (Harvey et al., 2018). 

The data that is required to inform such global policy making, is sparse; from the 19 identified global sub-populations of polar bears, 10 were data-deficient in 2021 (IUCN, 2021). The pressure to fill such data-gaps on polar bear populations is furthermore rising, considering that the sea ice polar bears are presumed to be dependent on for their survival is expected to rapidly disappear as a result of climate change (Stirling et al., 2012). Although such pressures for data are most strongly manifested at the international level by such conservation platforms, its material consequences play out locally. For example through the specific agential, data-driven decisions that are made by polar bear biologists and research funders under international pressure to fill these data-gaps on Nunavut sub-population abundance. The meaningful inclusion of Inuit knowledge within these processes continues to be one of the most pressing issues at stake within Inuit self-determination (see ITK, 2018).

It is important to first reiterate here again what can be seen as ‘meaningful’ inclusion, through the paradigm of agential realism. To be meaningfully included within a phenomena like scientific knowledge, is to be an agential force that contributes to the determining cut that distinguishes between what is included and what is excluded from the properties and meanings of such a phenomena. In this case, to be meaningfully included, means to co-determine the meaning of ‘scientific knowledge’. Without meaningful recognition or consideration of different knowledge systems within the phenomena of ‘science’, for example, the properties of ‘science’ become intelligible only through the agential cuts of one philosophical paradigm. In scientific wildlife co-management and research this is usually the cut of post-positivist western natural sciences and its understanding of the world through representative data (Brook, 2005; Smylie, 2014). 

Scientist seeking to make IQ ‘’intelligible’’ within this performance of western natural sciences, either need to break it down into such representative data, or placed IQ completely outside of the phenomena of Science to become intelligible as ‘another phenomena’ like; values, beliefs, ethics or cultural identities. Neither of those cuts can be considered meaningfully co-constituted with Inuit ways of knowing and being. Making IQ intelligible only as a category that can exist outside of science, continues a form of erasure in which the west views itself “as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge” (Smith, 1999, p. 63). While the breaking down of IQ into a reductionist western version of TEK, constitutes an ‘insidious form of cultural assimilation’ in which IQ is appropriated under the guise of knowledge co-production and co-management (Stevenson, 2004 ; 2006).