Can a Conservation‐Oriented Scientific Society Remain Relevant in the 21st Century?

Five years ago in the pages of this journal, Carroll et al. (2009) warned “Although the goal of globalizing the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) is laudable, we have gone about it in a way that guarantees that the organization will shrink because it is not meeting anyone’s needs for engagement and networking on a scale that is affordable and relevant to them professionally.” Since that time, SCB’s membership has declined by over onethird. Is this trend a consequence of the challenges arising from SCB’s globalization, or of unrelated factors such as dues increases, or from the general challenges facing scientific societies in the 21st century? More importantly, how can SCB and other scientific societies with a conservation mission overcome these challenges and remain relevant to the community of conservation scientists and practitioners? When SCB was founded in 1985, joining a scientific society provided access to a paper journal, as well as an opportunity to network with colleagues at annual conferences. Today, print journals have been largely supplanted by electronic versions, which are readily accessible to many academic conservation scientists via their university. An increased number of scientific conferences compete for attendees. As a result of these forces, smaller scientific societies have experienced a much starker downturn in membership in recent years than larger organizations (Potter et al. 2013). Potter et al. (2013) concluded that “membership-based organizations are broadly affected by six shifts that influence how individuals relate to their professional associations: increased competition for their time, an increased desire to see a return on their investment, more organizations competing for their attention, generational differences in the perceived value of membership, increased specialization of interest, and an increased expectation for technological adeptness.” The SCB, as a relatively small society compared with its peers in conservation-related fields, has been affected by these forces. While SCB’s membership has declined since 2008, membership (as reflected in publicly reported membership revenue) of the larger Ecological Society of America remained stable, while that of The Wildlife Society declined sharply and then stabilized (Supporting Information). These latter organizations may be benefiting from economies of scale in organizing large annual conferences, as well as (in the case of The Wildlife Society) a renewed focus on membership recruitment and development of local chapters. But SCB also differs from these organizations in being a global rather than a North America-based organization. This contrast adds additional challenges that compound the general trends threatening small scientific societies. Since 2002, SCB has been an integrated organization in which the 7 sections remain part of a single U.S.based fiscal entity (SCB-Global). In effect, SCB has settled on a partial transition from a single unified North American organization to a section-based global structure. This has resulted in SCB experiencing the challenges associated with a distributed organization without many of the related benefits. Because global conferences are cost-prohibitive for many conservation scientists, especially those associated with government agencies, section conferences continue to be a major engine for recruitment of new members. However, due to lack of local expertise, SCB-Global is of little assistance to sections in conference management. Similarly, association with a U.S.-based organization has provided the sections with little benefit in terms of regional fundraising and has in some cases been a barrier to securing grants from non-U.S. sources. Because SCB-Global’s Executive Office retains an identity as both a (formally) global and a (practically) North American organization, growth of the North American section as a separate entity has at times been seen as duplicative of or in competition with SCB-Global. The incomplete evolution of SCB from a national to a global organization has resulted in an unresolved debate between globalists and regionalists. Globalists prioritize the role of SCB at the global scale in addressing historical inequities in conservation science capacity between the developing and developed world and in building collaborations between scientists via global conferences. Conservation scientists may support these actions in part because they recognize that most biodiversity is in the developing world. There are examples of global scientific societies, such as the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE), that focus primarily on