Biodiversity Governance: Non-State and Sub-National Initiatives in Latin America

Abstract

Non-state and sub-national actors have been increasingly taking action to address biodiversity loss, however, only relatively recently their initiatives started being integrated into international biodiversity governance. Negacz and collaborators (2020a) mapped international and transnational cooperative initiatives for biodiversity, but the research was limited to information available in English. This fact may have influenced the results, especially concerning South American, African and Asian initiatives, as pointed out at the report itself. Hereby, we aim to achieve a better understanding of the institutional governance landscape related to biodiversity in Latin America by mapping volunteer initiatives involving non-state and sub-national actors in the region. The present approach can complement the aforementioned research. In order to do so, we partially used the methodology from Negacz et al. (2020a). The data collection consisted, first, of checking the same databases. For additional initiatives we considered the keywords established by Negacz et al. (2020a) translated to Spanish and Portuguese. Furthermore, we complemented the database by searching for specific terms in Spanish at the Google search engine. The data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics, observing which Latin American countries and actors were involved in the initiatives; if the initiatives had a direct, strong or weak link to biodiversity; the type of actors involved (public: governments or private: companies and Civil Society Organizations - CSOs); accountability, through monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), presence of quantitative targets and sanctions mechanisms, as well as time restriction; mention to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG); starting year and status of accomplishment. Our results show that Brazil, Colombia and Peru were the countries with the highest number of initiatives, whilst Cuba, Venezuela and Paraguay had the least. The most active actors were CSOs and the least were companies. Accountability was deficient and mention to the CBD and to the SDG was low. A higher number of initiatives was launched in the most recent years. Easily accessible information about the initiatives was the main limitation we faced. Additionally, the poor accountability raises doubts about initiatives’ effectiveness.