Making Nature Conservation Inclusive, Equitable and Fair
As part of the international team of the ENVISION project, our group members Prof. Tobias Plieninger and Dr. Miguel A. Cebrián have described the tensions and prospects associated with the inclusive management of protected areas.
Following up on the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), the new Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework is currently being developed. With this framework, the UN CBD Secretariat aims to set new global guidelines for managing nature through 2030.
Compared to earlier frameworks, the GBF places an increasing focus on environmental justice, as well as on fair and equitable decision-making processes.
Together with 23 researchers from around the world, which have collaborated during the last three years within the frame of the project ENVISION, our team members Dr. Miguel A. Cebrián and Prof. Tobias Plieninger from the Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems section support this process by pointing out barriers and pathways to the so-called ‘inclusive conservation’. They recently published the results of their work in the journal One Earth.
Tensions of equitable nature conservation
According to the researchers, inclusive conservation comes with certain tensions, which have to be recognised and addressed. First of all:
Should conservation end at the boundary lines of protected areas?
This is a crucial issue: The overall notion of a protected area comes with clear spatial and sectoral delimitations — sometimes in the most obvious form of fences. However, landscape management approaches, which treat issues across these boundary lines, but also across organizational sectors and scales, work much better to account for the realities of the highly interconnected world we live in.
Secondly, conservation management faces the complex challenge to include multiple stakeholders, considering their visions for and values of nature. The aim would ideally be to reduce trade-offs while still considering existing pluralities. Moreover, in processes of decision-making consensus is of course the desired outcome. When it comes to inclusive approaches, however, points of disagreement are constitutive:
There is thus a tension between the overarching need to seek consensus, and the recognition of discordant voices.
A last tension touches the roots of global knowledge hierarchies, notably the hegemony of the Western science system and the accompanying principles:
What counts as evidence, and how can this evidence be systematically collated and presented to inform decision-making?
Inclusive conservation requires the incorporation of local and experiential knowledge into the dominant Western knowledge system. This overdue reform would bring conservation management a huge step forward with regards to justice and equitability.
Governance through reflexivity
In order to recognise, soften, and, where possible, reframe the described tensions, the research team finally presents a governance framework on the grounds of case examples of protected area management in Sweden, The Netherlands, the United States and Spain. Based on these case studies, they recommend
- recognising hybridity and multiple layers of tension,
- enabling conditions for a (self-)reflexive, critical management, and
- forging new partnerships.
This framework can improve stakeholder engagement in protected area management, ultimately supporting better implementation of global biodiversity targets.
Inclusive conservation is thus about identifying, untying and retying the knots — the following graph provides an overview:
Further info & contact details
Original Paper: Raymond et al. Inclusive conservation and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework: Spannungen und Aussichten, One Earth (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.02.008.
- Dr. Miguel Á. Cebrián-Piqueras, Section Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems, Georg-August University Göttingen / University of Kassel, cebrian@uni-goettingen.de
- Prof. Tobias Plieninger, Section Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems, Georg-August University Göttingen / University of Kassel, plieninger@uni-goettingen.de
More information about the ENVISION project: https://inclusive-conservation.org/
ENVISION is funded through the 2017–2018 Belmont Forum and BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals, under the BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND programme, and with the support of the following national funders: Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) (Grant: FKZ:01LC1806A), Germany, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), US National Science Foundation (grant number 1854767), a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. National Park Service (P18AC00175), the University of Illinois Campus Research Board (RB19119), and the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain.
