Intergovernmental Platform On Biodiversity And Ecosystem Services Research Articles

Stakeholder Engagement in the Making: IPBES Legitimization Politics

A growing number of expert organizations aim to provide knowledge for global environmental policy-making. Recently, there have also been explicit calls for stakeholder engagement at the global level to make scientific knowledge relevant and usable on the ground. The newly established Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is one of the first international expert organizations to have systematically developed a strategy for stakeholder engagement in its own right. In this article, we analyze the emergence of this strategy. Employing the concept “politics of legitimation,” we examine how and for what reasons stakeholder engagement was introduced, justified, and finally endorsed, as well as its effects. The article explores the process of institutionalizing stakeholder engagement, as well as reconstructing the contestation of the operative norms (membership, tasks, and accountability) regulating the rules for this engagement. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of the findings for IPBES, as well as for international expert organizations in general.

Accommodating consensus and diversity in environmental knowledge production: Achieving closure through typologies in IPBES

How can a diversity of perspectives be accommodated in scientific and political consensus on environmental issues? This paper adopts a science and technology studies (STS) approach to examine how the pursuit of consensus-based knowledge and diverse participation, as seemingly contradictory commitments, have been converted into practice in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Through a series of negotiations, these commitments have been translated into a set of situated practices that now dominate this expert panel. Consensus has been achieved through the pursuit of closure, in which meetings of expert and administrator groups produce texts, tables and images that stabilise ostensibly collective decisions. Within this framework, diverse perspectives have been accommodated through the production of typologies, such as lists of comparable options, which allow for the coexistence and commensurability of a range of knowledges and experts. However there is a politics to typologies, which requires specific attention to how decisions are made (deliberation), who participates in them (participation), and the extent to which these participants are representative of broader knowledge and policy communities (representation). While the potential of typologies to accommodate consensus and diversity offers the hope of realising ‘unity in diversity’ for both environmental knowledge and policy, recognising the politics of their production is important for more equitable processes of environmental governance.

From dichotomy to duality: Addressing interdisciplinary epistemological barriers to inclusive knowledge governance in global environmental assessments

This paper provides an account of how epistemological differences between the natural and physical sciences and social sciences may be a barrier to multiscalar and inclusive forms of knowledge governance in global environmental assessments (GEAs). It proposes the concept of geographies of knowledge, to designate both the universalising drive of a positivist epistemology and the localism of relativist and constructivist epistemologies. The paper attempts to determine whether these conflicting geographies of knowledge have been barriers to greater integration of non-scientific knowledge systems − such as Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) − by looking at the cases of three GEAs: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The paper concludes that innovations in knowledge governance which seek to give more weight to non-scientific knowledge systems should more explicitly acknowledge and address interdisciplinary epistemological differences.

Research on Biodiversity and Climate Change at a Distance: Collaboration Networks between Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Biodiversity loss and climate change are both globally significant issues that must be addressed through collaboration across countries and disciplines. With the December 2015 COP21 climate conference in Paris and the recent creation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), it has become critical to evaluate the capacity for global research networks to develop at the interface between biodiversity and climate change. In the context of the European Union (EU) strategy to stand as a world leader in tackling global challenges, the European Commission has promoted ties between the EU and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in science, technology and innovation. However, it is not clear how these significant interactions impact scientific cooperation at the interface of biodiversity and climate change. We looked at research collaborations between two major regions—the European Research Area (ERA) and LAC—that addressed both biodiversity and climate change. We analysed the temporal evolution of these collaborations, whether they were led by ERA or LAC teams, and which research domains they covered. We surveyed publications listed on the Web of Science that were authored by researchers from both the ERA and LAC and that were published between 2003 and 2013. We also run similar analyses on other topics and other continents to provide baseline comparisons. Our results revealed a steady increase in scientific co-authorships between ERA and LAC countries as a result of the increasingly complex web of relationships that has been weaved among scientists from the two regions. The ERA-LAC co-authorship increase for biodiversity and climate change was higher than those reported for other topics and for collaboration with other continents. We also found strong differences in international collaboration patterns within the LAC: co-publications were fewest from researchers in low- and lower-middle-income countries and most prevalent from researchers in emerging countries like Mexico and Brazil. Overall, interdisciplinary publications represented 25.8% of all publications at the interface of biodiversity and climate change in the ERA-LAC network. Further scientific collaborations should be promoted 1) to prevent less developed countries from being isolated from the global cooperation network, 2) to ensure that scientists from these countries are trained to lead visible and recognized biodiversity and climate change research, and 3) to develop common study models that better integrate multiple scientific disciplines and better support decision-making.

The Network of Knowledge approach: improving the science and society dialogue on biodiversity and ecosystem services in Europe

The absence of a good interface between scientific and other knowledge holders and decision-makers in the area of biodiversity and ecosystem services has been recognised for a long time. Despite recent advancements, e.g. with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), challenges remain, particularly concerning the timely provision of consolidated views from different knowledge domains. To address this challenge, a strong and flexible networking approach is needed across knowledge domains and institutions. Here, we report on a broad consultation process across Europe to develop a Network of Knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services (NoK), an approach aiming at (1) organising institutions and knowledge holders in an adaptable and responsive framework and (2) informing decision-makers with timely and accurate biodiversity knowledge. The consultation provided a critical analysis of the needs that should be addressed by a NoK and how it could complement existing European initiatives and institutions at the interface between policy and science. Among other functions, the NoK provides consolidated scientific views on contested topics, identification of research gaps to support relevant policies, and horizon scanning activities to anticipate emerging issues. The NoK includes a capacity building component on interfacing activities and contains mechanisms to ensure its credibility, relevance and legitimacy. Such a network would need to ensure credibility, relevance and legitimacy of its work by maximizing transparency and flexibility of processes, quality of outputs, the link to data and knowledge provision, the motivation of experts for getting involved and sound communication and capacity building.

How IPBES Works: The Functions, Structures and Processes of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an international knowledge institution established through the United Nations system. Mandated to “strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services”, IPBES has a detailed set of intergovernmentally agreed functions, structures and processes that guide its first Work Program (2014-2018). This working paper sets out these institutional arrangements, noting that broader understanding of the IPBES mechanisms may assist wider participation, accountability, and scholarly analysis.

Amerindian and Afro-American Perceptions of Their Traditional Knowledge in the Chocó Biodiversity Hotspot

The Choco biodiversity hotspot is one of the most biodiverse and threatened regions on earth, yet the traditional knowledge (TK) of its inhabitants about biodiversity remains little studied. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) aims to integrate different knowledge systems, including scientific and TK, to assess the state of the planet’s biodiversity. We documented the TK of three ethnic groups: Afro-Colombians (n = 86 participants), Amerindian Embera (n = 88), and Tsa’chila (n = 52), focusing on their perceptions about (i) the most important palms, (ii) current vs. past uses, (iii) and TK transmission. We found 46 useful palm species and 520 different uses of palms. The species that were most important in local people’s views also had high use value, based on a commonly used quantitative index in ethnobotany. Although construction was the most commonly mentioned use category, palm materials were absent in Afro-Colombian and Tsa’chila homes, and were being increasingly replaced in Embera homes. In all three cultures, it was generally believed that TK was not being transmitted to the younger generations. In aggregate, the current perceptions of decreasing transmission of TK, decreasing use of forests, and intergenerational differences in perceptions in the Choco could accelerate the erosion of TK. Therefore, this could ultimately limit the contribution of Amerindian and Afro-Colombian TK to IPBES’s goals of assessing on-the-ground changes in biodiversity.

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): progress and next steps

Biodiversity and the services ecosystems provide have built the foundation of human civilization and provide for the welfare of people. With the increase of the human population it has become clearer than ever that the human exploitation of our natural resources leads to detrimental interactions between ecological and sociological systems. Only concerted and global actions will be able to reverse ongoing biodiversity loss. In response to these needs, the United Nations agreed the establishment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in 2010. Here, we report on the progress IPBES has made since its inception, and suggest how the scientific community can engage with this important science-policy interface.

Analysing biodiversity and conservation knowledge products to support regional environmental assessments

Two processes for regional environmental assessment are currently underway: the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) and Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Both face constraints of data, time, capacity, and resources. To support these assessments, we disaggregate three global knowledge products according to their regions and subregions. These products are: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Key Biodiversity Areas (specifically Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas [IBAs], and Alliance for Zero Extinction [AZE] sites), and Protected Planet. We present fourteen Data citations: numbers of species occurring and percentages threatened; numbers of endemics and percentages threatened; downscaled Red List Indices for mammals, birds, and amphibians; numbers, mean sizes, and percentage coverages of IBAs and AZE sites; percentage coverage of land and sea by protected areas; and trends in percentages of IBAs and AZE sites wholly covered by protected areas. These data will inform the regional/subregional assessment chapters on the status of biodiversity, drivers of its decline, and institutional responses, and greatly facilitate comparability and consistency between the different regional/subregional assessments.

The participation of experts and knowledges in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

This paper examines the participation opportunities and role of nominated experts from the Eastern European region in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The governance of international knowledge-making spaces and events occurs through standardised institutional rules and expectations that affect experts as well as define accepted forms of knowledge. Within IPBES, experts may participate through United Nations Regional Groupings, which are regions that have complex geopolitical legacies and features. Between regions, experts have variable financial, networking and institutional capacities that in turn affect the operations and outputs of their contributions to science-policy interfaces. For IPBES, regional and localised environmental assessments and ecosystem services valuations require existing place-specific knowledge that may not be ‘available’, as well as understandings that are frequently in conflict with the standardised, homogenising practices of international environmental knowledge-making.

The IPBES Conceptual Framework: An Unhelpful Start

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have recently launched themselves as the UN-sanctioned instrument for conserving nature. They seek to establish themselves as the authority in this field alongside the well-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in climate science. Quickly following or even before recent publication of their conceptual framework in two biology journals, they were already underway building upon it. This headlong push, we believe, is ill advised. We show how the framework is unsound as a foundation for further work—in a number of ways and perhaps even by its authors’ own lights. It is therefore urgent that the IPBES thoroughly and thoughtfully reconsider their framework before too much effort is wasted.

The ecosystem service of sense of place: benefits for human well-being and biodiversity conservation

SUMMARYAssessing the cultural benefits provided by non-market ecosystem services can contribute previously unknown information to supplement conservation decision-making. The concept of sense of place embeds all dimensions of peoples’ perceptions and interpretations of the environment, such as attachment, identity or symbolic meaning, and has the potential to link social and ecological issues. This review contains: (1) an evaluation of the importance of sense of place as an ecosystem service; and (2) comprehensive discussion as to how incorporating sense of place in an evaluation can uncover potential benefits for both biodiversity conservation and human well-being. Sense of place provides physical and psychological benefits to people, and has neglected economic value. The biodiversity-related experiences are essential components of the service that need to be further explored. A conceptual framework was used to explore how the existing knowledge on sense of place derived from other fields can be used to inform conservation decision-making, but further research is needed to fill existing gaps in knowledge. This review contributes to a better understanding of the role biodiversity plays in human well-being, and should inform the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

IPBES and Biodiversity Expertise: Regional, Gender, and Disciplinary Balance in the Composition of the Interim and 2015 Multidisciplinary Expert Panel

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an expert institution expected to transform the governance of biodiversity and ecosystem services. IPBES expands on previous initiatives and positions itself as a knowledge-policy interface open to different ways of knowing biodiversity. In this contribution, we analyze how the principles of regional, gender, and disciplinary balance that were adopted by IPBES have been applied to the Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP): the body of experts responsible for the scientific and technical functions of IPBES and embedded in its knowledge-making practices. In doing so, we compare the selection of the interim MEP in 2013 with the new MEP in 2015 and find a small improvement in gender and disciplinary balance that varies across the United Nations regional groupings. According to the ambition of IPBES, there is significant room for improvement, but opening-up expertise in an intergovernmental setting proves challenging.

Framing global biodiversity: IPBES between mother earth and ecosystem services

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an emerging expert advisory institution that aims at tackling the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services. Building on the experience of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and on previous biodiversity-related assessments, IPBES aspires to create a new type of science–policy interface: achieving balance between developed and developing countries, and being inclusive of different disciplines and knowledge-systems. While competing framings and discourses about biodiversity are expressed in these global settings, IPBES has also adopted a single conceptual framework to support its work. Yet, this process was punctuated by many debates and the notion of ‘ecosystem services’ was contested. This paper uses Sciences and Technology Studies (STS) concepts and methods to investigate the development of the IPBES conceptual framework during the period 2012–2014. In particular we ask whether, and how, debates amongst participants about the nature of knowledge, the relationship between humans and nature, and about the meaning of ‘ecosystem services’ were reconciled through this process. We discuss what is achieved by the IPBES conceptual framework and whether it could prove itself a boundary object. Our findings serve to highlight the multiple ways in which the science–policy interface is being imagined and to reveal some of the challenges awaiting biodiversity governance as ontological and epistemic plurality are embraced at a global scale.

Biodiversity governance: a Tower of Babel of scales and cultures.

The recently created Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), originally focused on multilateral and global issues, is shifting its focus to address local issues and to include in its assessments local stakeholders and indigenous and traditional systems of knowledge. Acknowledging that full biodiversity governance is unavoidably rooted in participation of local actors and their problems and knowledge, we suggest that to deal successfully with the complexity and diversity of local issues, including indigenous knowledge systems, IPBES must recognize a key role of local institutions.

A Rosetta Stone for nature's benefits to people.

After a long incubation period, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is now underway. Underpinning all its activities is the IPBES Conceptual Framework (CF), a simplified model of the interactions between nature and people. Drawing on the legacy of previous large-scale environmental assessments, the CF goes further in explicitly embracing different disciplines and knowledge systems (including indigenous and local knowledge) in the co-construction of assessments of the state of the world’s biodiversity and the benefits it provides to humans. The CF can be thought of as a kind of “Rosetta Stone” that highlights commonalities between diverse value sets and seeks to facilitate crossdisciplinary and crosscultural understanding. We argue that the CF will contribute to the increasing trend towards interdisciplinarity in understanding and managing the environment. Rather than displacing disciplinary science, however, we believe that the CF will provide new contexts of discovery and policy applications for it.

The Co-production of Scale and Power: The Case of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between scale and power in the context of scientific assessments. Scientific advisory boards and assessment processes strongly influence how the spatial dimensions of environmental problems are defined and thus how power relations are reconfigured accordingly across scales and levels. The question of scale along with its implications for policy-making has become a contested factor in the design of such assessment processes. In particular, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) has dealt explicitly with the issue of scale and how it is related to decision-making across institutional levels. Starting out from a critical reading of experiences with the MA, this paper analyses the design process of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in terms of how issues of scale are being addressed.Section 2 presents the analytical framework. It combines the scholarly literature on critical state theory and science and technology studies. Both approaches challenge notions of scale as ‘natural’, ‘fixed’, bounded spatial units. They draw our attention to scalar configurations ‘in the making’ and highlight the need to take the relationships between knowledge and power seriously. The concluding section argues that the selection of scale is a matter of political contestation and normative choice rather than of purely scientific judgement. Using the MA and IPBES examples we show that although assessments are often seen as a means to achieve unbiased, rational solutions by ‘keeping politics out of policy’ (Haas, 1992), there is a need to better understand their inherent connection to the distribution of power and to implicit forms of delegation.

Achievements and future challenges for environment and development economics

Addressing the challenge of ecological limits to economic growth and protection of the commons has been the central focus of scholarly research and policy debate in the world of EDE over the past two decades. Notable progress has been realized on a number of fronts but big challenges remain. Advances in the theory and practice of sustainable development, moving away from income measures such as GDP and promoting inclusive wealth as the right indicator of change in wellbeing and sustainability for the evaluation of economic performance and associated progress with the development and use of natural resources and environmental accounts represent one major example. Another important example is the ecosystem services (ES) approach of the millennium ecosystem assessment that has now become the main framework widely adopted as the basis for the characterization, valuation and evaluation of tradeoffs among the multiple services of ecosystems impacted by the pursuit of economic growth. Together with progress in the science and economics of addressing climate change, these advances moved the EDE focus from micro- to macro-environmental economics management issues. Major manifestations of progress on these fronts include: the emphasis on the green economy for ‘the future we want’ at Rio+20 and the intended move beyond the millennium development goals (MDGs) to redirect future efforts of the international community towards new sustainable development goals (SDGs) and targets; global consensus and support for establishing an Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES); and efforts to better define planetary boundaries.

Towards a Reflexive Turn in the Governance of Global Environmental Expertise. The Cases of the IPCC and the IPBES

The role and design of global expert organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) needs rethinking. Acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all model does not exist, we suggest a reflexive turn that implies treating the governance of expertise as a matter of political contestation.

Testing Focus Groups as a Tool for Connecting Indigenous and Local Knowledge on Abundance of Natural resources with Science‐Based Land Management Systems

AbstractOne of the clearly stated intentions of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to bring both “western scientific” and “indigenous and local” knowledge systems within synthetic global, regional, and thematic assessments. A major challenge will be how to use, and quality‐assure, information derived from different knowledge systems. We test how indigenous and local knowledge on natural resources in Miskito and Mayangna communities in Nicaragua, validated through focus groups with community members, compares with information collected on line transects by trained scientists. Both provide comparable data on natural resource abundance, but focus groups are eight times cheaper. Such approaches could increase the amount and geographical scope of information available for assessments at all levels, while simultaneously empowering indigenous and local communities who generally have limited engagement in such processes.