Letting the managers manage: analyzing capacity to conserve biodiversity in a cross-border protected area network

Biodiversity loss is one of the most significant drivers of ecosystem change and is projected to continue at a rapid rate. While protected areas, such as national parks, are seen as important refuges for biodiversity, their effectiveness in stemming biodiversity decline has been questioned. Public agencies have a critical role in the governance of many such areas, but there are tensions between the need for these agencies to be more “adaptive” and their current operating environment. Our aim is to analyze how institutions enable or constrain capacity to conserve biodiversity in a globally significant cross-border network of protected areas, the Australian Alps. Using a novel conceptual framework for diagnosing biodiversity institutions, our research examined institutional adaptive capacity and more general capacity for conserving biodiversity. Several intertwined issues limit public agencies’ capacity to fulfill their conservation responsibilities. Narrowly defined accountability measures constrain adaptive capacity and divert attention away from addressing key biodiversity outcomes. Implications for learning were also evident, with protected area agencies demonstrating successful learning for on-ground issues but less success in applying this learning to deeper policy change. Poor capacity to buffer political and community influences in managing significant cross-border drivers of biodiversity decline signals poor fit with the institutional context and has implications for functional fit. While cooperative federalism provides potential benefits for buffering through diversity, it also means protected area agencies have restricted authority to address cross-border threats. Restrictions on staff authority and discretion, as public servants, have further implications for deploying capacity. This analysis, particularly the possibility of fostering “ambidexterity”—creatively responding to political pressures in a way that also achieves a desirable outcome for biodiversity conservation—is one promising way of building capacity to buffer both political influences and ecological pressures. The findings and the supporting analysis provide insight into how institutional capacity to conserve biodiversity can be enhanced in protected areas in Australia and elsewhere, especially those governed by public agencies and/or multiple organizations and across jurisdictions.

SMART social science? Examining the nature and role of social scientific expertise in institutional design

Daniel Bromley argues against Oran Young’s FIT model as a basis for environmental governance, on the grounds that humans cannot manage nature and that attempts to do so are based on a scientistic, modernist conceit. At issue is the role of natural and social scientists in adjudicating questions about what we ought to do to close governance gaps and address unsustainable behaviors. If Bromley is right, then the lessons of the American pragmatist tradition recommend against attempts to “fit” social institutions to the natural world. The first objective of this paper is to argue that Bromley’s view is not in keeping with the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, which actually places a high value on natural and social scientific modes of inquiry in the service of social ends. I argue that Young’s proposal is in fact a development of the pragmatist idea that social institutions must be fit in the sense of fitness, i.e., resilient and able to navigate uncertainty. Social institutions must also evolve to accommodate the emerging values of the agents who operate within them. The second objective of this paper is to examine the role of social science expertise in the design of social policies. Governance institutions typically rely on the testimony of natural scientists, at least in part, to understand the natural systems they operate within. However, natural systems are also social systems, so it seems pertinent to ask whether there is a role for social systems experts to play in helping to design environmental governance institutions. I argue that social scientists can make a unique contribution as experts on social institutions, and as such, are necessary to bring about a transformation of the unsustainable institutions that are preventing us from achieving stated sustainable development goals.

Institutional entrepreneurship and techniques of inclusiveness in the creation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

This article contributes to understanding the conditions of social-ecological change by focusing on the agency of individuals in the pathways to institutionalization. Drawing on the case of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), it addresses institutional entrepreneurship in an emerging environmental science-policy institution (ESPI) at a global scale. Drawing on ethnographic observations, semistructured interviews, and document analysis, we propose a detailed chronology of the genesis of the IPBES before focusing on the final phase of the negotiations toward the creation of the institution. We analyze the techniques and skills deployed by the chairman during the conference to handle the tensions at play both to prevent participants from deserting the negotiations arena and to prevent a lack of inclusiveness from discrediting the future institution. We stress that creating a new global environmental institution requires the situated exercise of an art of “having everybody on board” through techniques of inclusiveness that we characterize. Our results emphazise the major challenge of handling the fragmentation and plasticity of the groups of interest involved in the institutionalization process, thus adding to the theory of transformative agency of institutional entrepreneurs. Although inclusiveness might remain partly unattainable, such techniques of inclusiveness appear to be a major condition of the legitimacy and success of the institutionalization of a new global ESPI. Our results also add to the literature on boundary making within ESPIs by emphasizing the multiplicity and plasticity of the groups actually at stake.