Healing Fragmentation of Forest Biosecurity Networks: A Conceptual and Reflexive Mapping Analysis of Postcolonial Relations that Matter in Aotearoa|New Zealand and Cymru|Wales

Scientific biosecurity has become an important approach for managing the threats to Kauri trees and plant management in Aotearoa|New Zealand and Cymru|Wales, more generally. However, the conceptual apparatus of biosecurity does not make the relations and overlaps between people, knowledges or values visible in practice. This is particularly so for Indigenous Māori knowledge and ontologies, which are not yet fully integrated into this field. This paper has two aims. The first is to understand how the fragmentation of the biosecurity system concerning plant pathogens is reproducing colonial relations, while shaping biosecurity practices in new ways. The second is to use postcoloniality theory as an analytic tool to understand the role that local and Indigenous knowledge and ontologies play in the biosecurity system more globally. This lens is specifically turned on the social scientific understandings of biosecurity and used to analyse the relationships of others involved in the generation and use of biosecurity science for the protection of trees in Aotearoa|New Zealand and Cymru|Wales, analysing through the lens of social science, our interviews, and focus groups with them. Two places and ways of understanding postcoloniality are deliberately evoked so that postcolonial relations become the dominant lens for understanding how society and the environment have become dis/entangled in the biosecurity system in various ways. Some consistent clusters of biosecurity fragmentation can be identified along with the emergence of specific social and environmental relations that underpin shared aspects of care with/for trees and ecosystem conservation. This result demonstrates the impact that fragmentation could have on building a relational structure and ethics of biosecurity, linking communities, geographies, policies and values. Our conclusions echo the range of questions and relations at stake resulting from this fragmentation of biosecurity and show the role(s) that social scientists and Pākehā scientists can have in opening spaces for new postcolonial biosecurity practices to emerge.