Abstract
There is considerable interest in improving participatory governance in decision-making processes for the conservation of biodiversity and management of conflicts between humans and wildlife. Among the various modes of participatory governance, deliberative democracy has received virtually no attention for decisions focused on conserving biodiversity. This is surprising given that deliberative democracy is an important branch of democratic theory and is associated with decision-making processes that have been successfully applied to a wide range of complicated decisions across diverse cultural settings. Moreover, deliberative democracy has several distinctive properties that would seem to make it well-suited for many conservation decisions. First, deliberative democracy is better-designed than other processes to handle cases where the object of conservation appears to be insufficiently valued by those who have the most detrimental impacts on its conservation. Second, deliberative democracy engenders a rich kind of representation and impartiality that is nearly impossible to achieve with participatory governance focused on managing conflicts among hyper-engaged stakeholders. Here, we review the principles of deliberative democracy, outline procedures for its application to carnivore conservation, and consider its likelihood to favor carnivore conservation.
Highlights
Governance and decision-making in conservation take various forms that may be characterized as being situated along a spectrum, with one end representing decisions by government officials with little citizen involvement and the other end representing decisions with extensive involvement of citizens
We use the word to indicate that groups of people living in a geopolitical community often do not collectively place sufficient value on certain species to result in such species being adequately conserved
Focusing participatory governance on carnivore conservation is apropos because large carnivores tend to engender considerable emotional valence among already-engaged stakeholders in a manner likely to compound the difficulty of deliberative decision-making (Slagle et al, 2012; Flykt et al, 2013)
Summary
Carnivores are emblematic of many challenges in conservation for being insufficiently valued to reverse their dismal and deteriorating conservation status. Carnivore conservation is like many conservation challenges in that the costs and benefits of conservation are often experienced unequally among the members of society These circumstances represent problems for participatory governance, which tends to court participation by those already deeply committed for or against conservation. While such engagement is appropriate, there is a need for processes that have broader representation and are more likely to elicit non-prejudicial judgments about conservation-related policies and decisions. We outline a process, known as deliberative democracy, that explicitly aims to handle these concerns This process is well-known among political theorists and has been applied to many complicated cases. It has received little attention among those interested in decision-making and governance that pertains to the conservation of biodiversity
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