When conservation research goes awry: A reply to Mascia and Mills (2018)

We raise two points of contention with “When conservation goes viral: The diffusion of innovative biodiversity conservation policies and practices” in which Mascia and Mills make a case for “diffusion of innovation theory” as a way of understanding how conservation interventions spread, drawing on case studies from Tanzania and the Pacific. First, the conceptualization of the spread of CBNRM as the uptake of innovative policies through diffusion depoliticizes CBNRM and ignores existing social science scholarship on Tanzanian CBNRM. Second, the article's central claim of “diffusion” builds on inflated statistics on the spread of CBNRM in Tanzania.