Constructing Biodiversity Risk: A Processual Study of Translation

This paper examines how biodiversity has been translated from an ecological concern into an organisational risk. Building on Hardy & Maguire's (2020) concept of risk translation, I develop a processual account of how biodiversity has become progressively shaped to fit categories of operational, reputational, credit, and legal risks. 

While social and environmental accounting scholarship has examined biodiversity disclosure practices, it predominantly assumes accountability demands as given, focusing on improving reporting mechanisms. This approach leaves unexamined the institutional and material conditions through which biodiversity became a legitimate item to "account for" in organisations. Within a four-decades-long tradition of risk studies across sociology, management and organisation theory, this paper draws from works that conceptualise risk as a socio-political achievement. Risks are socially constructed objects emerging through discursive practices, material artefacts, and institutional arrangements, while risk translation processes make unfamiliar phenomena legible by reframing them within familiar risk categories. 

Drawing on document-based discourse analysis of reports, guidelines, and policy documents produced in the UK and EU between 1992 and 2023, the study identifies two distinct translation phases. The first phase (1992–2004) traces three enabling conditions that made biodiversity visible as a novel risk: impact and dependency framing (establishing causal links between business operations and ecological harm), ecosystem services thinking (estimating nature's contributions in economic terms), and eco-informatics (advancements in ecological data computation and display). The second phase (2004–2023) examines how diverse actors translated the novel risk into their institutional categories: corporates framed it as operational, legal and reputational risk, financial institutions as credit risk, governments as legitimacy risk, and central banks and regulators as systemic financial risk. 

The findings make two contributions. First, they demonstrate that accounting for biodiversity is not solely a response to external accountability demands but the product of ongoing risk construction that actively creates demand for new accounting infrastructures, metrics, and frameworks. Second, they extend risk translation studies by revealing that translations unfold through stages in which conditions of possibility establish new risk visibility, critical inflexion points enable conceptual shifts, and actors gradually become engaged, reshaping possibilities for accounting and environmental risk governance.