Enhancing data justice in community‐led conservation: A case study from Indonesian Borneo

Biodiversity conservation is undergoing a process of datafication, driven by calls for evidence‐based conservation and rapid technological advances. These developments promise to enhance conservation efforts, but they also raise ethical questions. While most existing research on conservation data justice focuses on large data sets and novel technologies, this paper explores data justice in community‐led conservation. We build on a conservation data justice framework, which distinguishes five dimensions of conservation data (composition, access, use, control, and consequences), by adding a sixth dimension: data collection. We apply this framework to two community‐led programs in Indonesian Borneo, supported by the Non‐Governmental Organization (NGO) Planet Indonesia. Through semi‐structured interviews with NGO staff and local community members, we examine how data justice is perceived and assessed in conservation practice. Respondents raised a variety of justice concerns. Overall, they viewed data composition and consequences positively, but raised critical concerns about access, use, and control. These findings help illustrate the variety of opportunities and challenges for data to enhance social justice in conservation and reveal the need for practical strategies to address the priorities and tradeoffs identified by ground‐level actors.