Equitable reconciliation of biodiversity conservation and food system sustainability in protected landscapes

In addressing today’s intricate ecological and societal challenges, long-term interventions that benefit both nature and people have gained traction under the umbrella term ‘Nature-based Solutions’ over the past decade. Multifunctional protected landscapes have emerged as one such solution to reconcile the different functions we expect nature to fulfil. Despite the surge in research on these landscapes, there is a need for more interdisciplinary and empirical research on the interplay of biodiversity protection and food system management.

We aim to contribute to understanding what conditions and pathways allow for successful integration of biodiversity and food systems, taking a broad perspective on food systems and the dynamic interactions across multiple scales. More specifically, we focus on the role of three pivotal, interrelated elements: human-nature connectedness, just landscape coalitions and social-ecological benefits. In doing so, we build on previous conceptualisations of justice (de Bruin et al. 2024), motivations and agency in collaborative landscape management (Turkelboom et al. in review), multiple dimensions of human-nature connectedness (Ives et al. 2018), and dynamics of social-ecological interdependencies (Barnaud et al. 2018).

These conditions and pathways towards how this reconciliation of biodiversity and food can be strengthened are grounded in both local realities and global insights. They result primarily from a qualitative comparative analysis (Ragin, 1987) we conducted across 21 cases, using a survey, rich case descriptions and expert workshops. Our findings reflect different types of agricultural practices, various histories, and varying levels of success in terms of biodiversity restoration and food sustainability.

We illustrate how top-down or bottom-up landscape coalitions are formed and to what extent their success depend on inclusivity, justice, power dynamics and socio-political structures on micro and macro levels. We also show how (environmentally) just practices are not self-evident in many contexts reconciling food and biodiversity. Barriers that need to be addressed include market driven changes in livelihood and exploitive practices, and enabling factors include bottom-up initiatives building alliances, trust, support for local communities and fostering interactions with nature.