Global biodiversity governance amidst green backlash

The Global Biodiversity Framework has led to optimism about the direction of biodiversity governance. On the other hand, recent years have also seen a green backlash against environmental policies among segments of society. Challenges for biodiversity governance include the mismatch between key stakeholder groups such as Indigenous, local, and practitioners’ knowledge and scientific knowledge; the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of conservation; and the struggle over power in decision making. We illustrate those challenges with examples of coexistence between humans and wildlife, such as wolves in Europe and elephants in Africa; the conservation of living landscapes in the face of climate change; and the impact of the energy transition on biodiversity.

Social science on collective action of shared resources has demonstrated conditions for successful outcomes related to those challenges. Those resource governance challenges require that people manage complex systems. Learning from experience or from peers is an effective way to build relevant mental models. Fairness is a key component in decision-making in social dilemmas. If people perceive distributions of costs and benefits as unjust (distributional justice), they reduce their cooperation. In addition, research shows that not the regulations themselves, but the process to establish those regulations are key for the success of governance (procedural justice). Finally, who is included and excluded in the governance process could lead to issues of recognition justice. Justice issues are therefore key for successful outcomes in collective action situations.

Applying these insights to biodiversity governance reveals the importance of participatory and experiential activities, as well as the transparency of the trade-offs of the potential interventions for key stakeholders. The different types of justice issues fuel some of the green backlash currently observed.

Governance of biodiversity is governing people. Natural science is needed to understand the conditions for ecosystems to maintain and revive biodiversity, and social science is needed to understand how to incentivize people. Governance is a messy process, and instead of focusing on grand designs, there is a need for context specific implementation that is adaptive to dealing with new emerging challenges and opportunities.