Conference Agenda

The first IPBES assessment demonstrated the need to radically transform the way we interact with biodiversity and nature. To move beyond short term, incremental change and instead generate radical shifts in our mindsets, policies, and practices in relation to the natural world, we must consider transformative changes in the context of the biodiversity nexus. Uncovering and understanding the diverse, intertwined relations between people and nature through interlinkages and interdependencies between biodiversity, water, food, energy, health, climate, and transport, is crucial for the shaping of governance that is transformative.

[Name of the project removed for anonymous review process] project aims to contribute to transformative governance in the biodiversity nexus by exploring what triggers transformative change in the context of the biodiversity nexus. This paper presents the project’s conceptual framework on transformative change in the biodiversity nexus and presents insights for transformative governance.

Building on our analysis of literature on transformative change, which spans the scope of the biodiversity nexus, we outline diverse portrayals of transformative change in relation to governance. We do so with the aim of contributing conceptual clarity to the broader debate on transformations to sustainability. Departing from a critical perspective to transformations, we demonstrate how the concepts ‘transformative change’ and ‘transformation’ are portrayed to have different meanings and calls for action across different scientific perceptions. Here, conceptual clarity is found in clustering these different portrayals of transformation, to outline different scientific perceptions of processes towards and means for transformation. Examples of these clusters are: ‘Transformation through technological innovation’ and ‘transformation through contestation/politics’, which differently understand how change unfolds and thus what transformative change is required. Using this lens on the biodiversity nexus, we sketch how these portrayals also lead to different biodiversity futures and ‘solution spaces’.

The paper concludes with a discussion of how these portrayals of transformation in the literature form a spectrum of change, ranging from radical change to incremental change. Conceptual clarity with respect to this ‘spectrum of change’, by outlining and identifying these different portrayals of transformation, supports a better understanding of what pathways of change and solutions are proposed across these diverse scientific fields and ultimately transformative governance when it comes to out use of and interaction with nature and biodiversity.

Many wildlife species, such as the wolf, lynx and wild boar, are making a comeback in Europe. This comeback is creating novel types of human-wildlife interactions and conflicts, especially in regions where wildlife has been absent for long periods of time. To navigate the European wildlife comeback and facilitate often-desired coexistence there is a need to better understand the social factors driving conflict. Most studies on human-wildlife interactions focus on damage control and technical aspects. People’s attitudes towards and tolerance of wildlife, however, are complex, and human-wildlife conflicts can also be manifestations of underlying conflicts between stakeholder groups. To facilitate human-wildlife coexistence we therefore need to look beyond short-term technical fixes and better understand the different social dynamics underpinning human-wildlife interactions. In this study, we used an interdisciplinary case-study approach to examine how values, beliefs and attitudes affect tolerance of wildlife and stakeholder cooperation in wildlife management and conservation. The study was conducted in the Western Carpathians of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a region of increasing human-wildlife conflicts due to human expansion, land development, and the comeback of large carnivores and wild boar.

We found that attitudes towards large carnivores have changed over the past decade in parallel to changes in social-ecological circumstances. Specifically, individual attitudes have become more positive since the return of large carnivores to the region. In contrast, residents perceived the general relationship between humans and carnivores in the region to have shifted slightly towards conflict rather than towards coexistence. We found that diverse opinions on the wildlife comeback persisted in the region, including differences between tolerant versus less tolerant farmers. Here, tolerant farmers regularly recognized relational values or beneficial regulating Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs), while less tolerant farmers often identified negative regulating NCPs such as wildlife-induced damage. Values also played a role in stakeholder cooperation. While different stakeholder groups clashed over wolf protection and the appropriate management of wild boar, cooperation between stakeholders was facilitated by similar policy-related core beliefs on problem framing and preferred solutions to human-wildlife conflicts. Our research demonstrates the relevance of investigating social factors underlying conservation conflicts and tolerance of wildlife to support a transformation towards low-conflict human-wildlife coexistence.

Monitoring marine biodiversity is one of the most challenging scientific and technological endeavours in contemporary ocean science and governance. At the same time, monitoring practices may be recast as research objects for Earth System Governance scholarship.

This paper aims to innovate methodology by extending how ESG thinks about the politics of anticipation and imagination to govern future sustainability challenges to the sites where data is produced and monitoring is conducted. To this end, we conceptualise monitoring as a contentious, multifaceted set of practices performed at the interface between marine scientific research, policymaking, and industrial interests. We propose an epistemological turn toward laboratories, which allowed us to study monitoring practices as ‘working archives’ of knowledge.

We conducted laboratory ethnography to investigate the sites where marine biodiversity data are produced and how. We selected three cases: Sao Paulo (Brazil), Brest (France) and San Diego (US). We designed a fieldwork strategy to engage with four themes of laboratory ethnography: ethnography of the epistemic, the interaction order of scientific meetings, sensory ethnography and spaces, places and rhythms. During each ethnography, we produced digital diaries where we reported the observations of the day, reflected on the main takes of what we learned about the laboratory practices and life, and collected visual data to document each ethnography.

In this paper, we compare seven dimensions of these laboratory sites: (1) Epistemic routines and knowledge production processes; (2) Processes of sample collection and data negotiation (including management and conflict); (3) Social interactions, processes and dynamics; (4) Physicality of the laboratory life (including space and communication); (5) Technology, gear, infrastructure interactions, dependence; (6) Potential power (a)symmetries including intersectionality and (colonial trajectories) of knowledge production; and (7) the ethnographer own positionality (in-group and out-group thinking).

Our results show that marine biodiversity monitoring research infrastructure is ‘working archives’ of science and identify the practices of making these archives. We consider laboratories as important sites currently overlooked in IR and we conclude by emphasizing the need to study their practices underpinning the materiality of knowledge. By feeding scientific working archives, the work of laboratories constitutes a site to observe how marine biodiversity monitoring policies anticipate and imagine future oceans.

There is increasing convergence amongst policymakers and stakeholders that climate change is the biggest threat facing the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). While the “super wicked” problem dimensions of climate change have been well-articulated, a more nuanced view of the solutions is lacking - the interventions needed to secure a sustainable future for the GBR.

Understanding social imaginaries around solutions is important for a number of reasons. It can aid in the design, implementation and prioritisation of actions in the context of complex systems change and multiple threats. This is particularly useful when related to policy tools and anticipatory governance arrangements that require legitimacy and buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders. Social imaginaries also may be indicative of acceptance or contestation of particular pathways – a co-determinant of policy performance.

We use the “problem-solution space” framework that has emerged from innovation studies to better characterise the framing and discourse around reef conservation from relevant actors after mass coral bleaching. We believed that identifying the problem-solution space could assist policy makers strategise to improve problem-solution convergence, which can help achievement of societal goals, such as reef conservation and tackling climate change.

To get a better understanding of soical imaginaries around solutions, we focused on actor perspectives, undertaking a series of interviews from 2021 – 2022 from a cross-sectoral sample of actors (civil society, government, industry, science) from local to international scales. Using Q-method, a mixed method qualitative and quantitative approach, participants were asked to rank 31 statements of interventions and discuss the reasons for their preferences.

Our analysis finds that there were six perspectives represented. Three of the viewpoints prioritised climate transitions with some variation about which policies would best tackle the issue and extent of desired transformation. However, the other viewpoints each prioritised proximate action, such as coral reef management and restoration, water quality, and landscape drivers. Interestingly, there was more convergence over the least desired interventions, which will be discussed. We also identify that within the “problem-solution space”, levels of uncertainty, contestation and complexity amongst solutions suggest the need for more reflexive governance approaches and linkages between climate transitions and reef governance which at this time are lacking.

Global environmental challenges require ocean observation, monitoring, and the innovative implementation of solutions at the local and regional levels. Natural biogeographical or geophysical characteristics of a territory may provide comparative advantages for scientific advancement and international collaboration with well-known examples such as the Galapagos Islands, the Amazon, Antarctica or Hawaii and other insular systems.

In this context, unique sites and their attributes have been proposed as policy instruments for public scientific development under the concept of natural laboratories, a framework that systematically considers features as assets, creating opportunities to attract investments and talent, as well as to direct and harness knowledge creation for local sustainable development.

However, a general lack of effective communication between scientists and local communities may cause scientific production at the territorial level to be fragmented or uncoupled from local needs, limiting use, spillovers, funding efficiency and missing opportunities from scientific knowledge generation by groups with access to networks and resources. Moreover, thinking about sustainability and transformation in the face of local and global challenges requires not only a strategy for strengthening science and technology based on natural attributes, but also a critical discussion about visions and targets.

Using the concept of natural laboratories, our objective was to identify places in the ocean that fulfil this concept in relation to biological, oceanographic and socioecological characteristics, analysing the overlap of attributes, research outputs and local stakeholders visions from a participatory perspective at the regional level, with a focus on the singularities of the central-north coast of Chile in the southeast Pacific (25°45'S to 33°10'S); specifically in the Humboldt Archipelago and Systems of Upwelling and Bays. We conducted an exploratory transdisciplinary approach with the participation of researchers as well as representatives from public agencies, local governments and coastal communities in online and field workshops and interviews. We identified gaps in research and its territorial application to inform policy and benefit from inter and transdisciplinary collaborations, and outlined a road map for capacity and impact building for scientific and technological development.

We recognize as key elements to implement a natural laboratory policy the promotion of interactions and networks between actors, linking global and local challenges, making knowledge accessible, identifying problems and needs in the territory, and establishing mechanisms to locally influence targets and resource allocation. Moreover, we discuss challenges and opportunities at the interface of ocean science, policy and local development to strengthen nature-based science and technology in the ocean.