The social sciences and the humanities in the intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPBES)

The role of the social sciences (including economics) and humanities is of paramount importance in the work of the Intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPBES), along with the natural sciences and technology. Too often national and international assessments have been dominated by natural scientists. The IPBES has recognized this weakness and has actively encouraged governments and scientific organizations to nominate social scientists and scholars from the humanities to be involved in IPBES activities, especially scientific assessments.

The assessment of the past, present and projected plausible future states of biodiversity and of nature's contributions to people (which includes ecosystem services), along with the implications for a good quality of life, requires a transdisciplinary approach. This approach must involve all relevant stakeholders (including scientists, governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations) in the co-design, co-production and co-communication of all of its activities, including thematic, spatial (regional and global) and methodological assessments, policy support tools, capacity-building and the stimulation of new research.

Governments have fully recognized that human activities are adversely affecting biodiversity and the Earth's climate, and have in the past few years negotiated three major international agreements, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Paris climate agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems and their services, just like human-induced climate change, are not just environmental issues, but economic, social, security and development issues. Indeed, most of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals cannot be met unless the twenty Aichi Targets and the goals embedded in the Paris climate agreement are met and vice versa.

Governments and other stakeholders do not need to be told how severe the situation is. What they primarily need to know is: what can be done to address the issues of loss of biodiversity and climate change?

Given the emphasis on response options in all of the IPBES assessments, the social sciences and humanities have a very critical role to play. The IPBES conceptual framework explicitly highlights the central role of drivers, anthropogenic assets and institutions, and implicitly the concept of economic and social values, which are clearly the domain of the social sciences and humanities.

Three high priority areas of work where social scientists have already made a major intellectual contribution are:

1. the conceptual framework, which acknowledges diverse world views, and models the interactions between people and nature, and nature's contributions to people (Díaz 2015);

2. the diverse conceptualization of values, which recognizes that values placed on nature and nature's contributions to people vary with cultural and institutional context. The newly developed framework recognizes the importance of an integrative and pluralistic valuation approach that takes into account diverse world views and a social-ecological perspective where nature, nature's contributions to people and a good quality of life are seen as interdependent, compared to a single world view, which tends to be an economic-dominated valuation. This work also recognizes that decision-making should take intrinsic, instrumental and relational values into account; and

3. an evolution of the concept of ecosystem services (provisioning, regulation and cultural) promoted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), to the concept of nature's contribution to people (NCP), (regulating, material and non-material), which embraces a more inclusive and diverse interpretation of human-nature interactions, reflecting the greater involvement of the social sciences, humanities and other knowledge systems, including indigenous and local knowledge, in the science-policy interface. One significant advance in thinking is the recognition that culture is all pervasive and influences all NCP, e.g. food production is both a material and non-material NCP, and is no longer a separate category as was the case in the MA (Diaz et al., 2018).

In addition to the pivotal role of social scientists in assessments, they are also fully involved in a number of expert groups. For example, social scientists are assisting in the development of a set of socio-economic indicators, and in particular how to merge indicators with what cannot be measured in a narrative approach through the knowledge and data management task group. Social scientists are also involved in the expert group on policy support tools and the task force on capacity-building.

This special issue on the role of social sciences and humanities in and for the IPBES is extremely timely, and shows the myriad of ways that social scientists and scholars from the humanities have and can contribute to the IPBES. As stated earlier, without the full involvement of social scientists and scholars from the humanities, the IPBES will not be able to meet its mandate to strengthen the science-policy interface. Scientists from all disciplines must be involved throughout the assessment process, from scoping, preparation, peer-review and dissemination. We call upon all organizations, including learned societies and networks of scientists, as well as colleagues from the social sciences and humanities to help us increase the number of social scientists in the IPBES.

Why governments would want a strong integration of experts from the fields of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the IPBES

The protection and sustainable use of biodiversity strongly depend on the best available science and other knowledge for developing and implementing policies and associated procedures and governance to balance nature conservation and the needs of people and local communities. This understanding is deeply entwined in the objectives of the Intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPBES) as outlined in the first part of this editorial by Bob Watson and in the essay by Anne Larigauderie and Marie Stenseke in this special issue (Stenseke and Larigauderie 2017).

Global change impacts, such as changing climate conditions, altering natural environments, migration, unsustainable consumption patterns, conflicting values associated with nature, and diverse perceptions on why and how to protect and use biodiversity, involve changing decision-making and governance processes as a response to the transformation of societies worldwide. Elinor Ostrom, for example, argues that addressing global environmental problems needs multi-scalar and polycentric styles of governing (Ostrom 2010), which requires increasingly knowledge-based, inclusive and participatory approaches.

These changes provide new opportunities, but – and at the same time – they anticipate emerging challenges: How can evidence-based policy measures to protect and sustainably use biodiversity be developed through a multi-stakeholder approach in order to ensure that specific circumstances and needs prevailing at local, national, regional and global scales are taken into account? Required societal and institutional changes and their (potential) impacts also have to be considered throughout the development of science-based options for decision-making on the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. In 2016 the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for instance underscored that

research on biodiversity requires not only natural sciences. In fact social sciences and humanities have to play a major role in assessing the world’s very different views on nature, its value, its conservation and the use of biological resources. Therefore we need anthropologic, economic, sociological and philosophical expertise.

Additionally, the limited progress in the implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 and its Aichi Targets raised major concerns at the thirteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP.13) in December 2016. This led to a decision taken at COP.13 that urges governments to ‘intensify their efforts’ (CBD 2016). The limited progress has also enhanced awareness of the need to consider societies, including the institutional and political frameworks established to strengthen knowledge transfer and public participation, as indispensable part of developing and implementing policy measures for safeguarding biodiversity. IPBES and its quest for inter- and transdisciplinarity contributes to addressing this need at the intergovernmental scale and through providing evidence for regional, national and local policy-making. The German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) therefore emphasised at the fifth plenary of the IPBES in 2017 that the next work programme of the IPBES should

have flexible features which are structured in a way that would allow IPBES to respond to needs as they emerge. Incoming requests by Governments, secretariats from multilateral agreements and other relevant stakeholders would be the basis for planning concrete assessments.

Why the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) are needed

We perceive three urgent needs, which constitute the rationale of this special issue: first, the need to capture diverse perceptions and values, knowledge forms and societal trends in the development of policy-relevant, evidence-based options to safeguard biodiversity, second, the need to involve stakeholders, including local communities, in the development and implementation of respective policies at different scales, and third the need to facilitate the production and use of knowledge and expertise from SSH in current assessment processes and exercises, such as the IPBES.

A strong and visible integration of SSH experts in IPBES assessments needs to be ensured to increase our understanding of the myriad facets and factors hampering and facilitating the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity (see also the first part of this editorial by Bob Watson). SSH experts are indispensable for the development of scenarios and models to protect biodiversity in so far as they significantly improve our ‘ … understanding and explanation of important relationships and feedbacks between components of coupled social-ecological systems’ (IPBES 2016, 22). SSH expertise is also necessary to understand and integrate socially relevant issues (including identification of incentives and benefits for people and communities) during the development of policy frameworks in response to such scenarios and models.

The strong integration of SSH expertise in IPBES assessments can also significantly enhance the abilities of expert groups to assess pragmatic and trustworthy ways on how best to convey uncertainties emerging from these assessments to decision-makers, and to other stakeholder communities, and to provide guidance on how to deal with uncertainty.

In other words, SSH expertise contributes to creating and strengthening institutional conditions that balance the needs of stakeholders and especially of local communities with the needs for the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity. SSH knowledge can support the development of institutional arrangements that ensure (a) knowledge and information transfer between different stakeholders, (b) awareness raising, (c) uninterrupted communication, including a two-way communication pathway between decision-makers, other stakeholders and local communities, (d) co-development and (e) co-implementation in order to enhance acceptance of necessary decisions and actions to protect biodiversity.

Finally, it is important to capture and assess research gaps in the fields of SSH, which may become evident during assessment phases of the IPBES and which would need to be addressed to improve the understanding of the increasingly multifaceted relationships between societies and biodiversity.

The history behind this special issue

It is against the background of the three needs described above that the German Federal Ministries BMUB (the national focal point for IPBES), and BMBF requested the German IPBES Coordination Office in November 2014 to (a) analyse the reason(s) that led or are leading to an under-representation of experts from social sciences and the humanities in the current expert groups of the IPBES and (b) to identify options on how to change this situation.

The analyses undertaken by the German IPBES coordination office in 2015 upon request of the BMUB and BMBF led to a chain of activities, which peaked in major events. The first of these was the organisation of a workshop in November 2015 where SSH experts from Austria, Germany and Switzerland met to discuss the reasons for the discrepancy between the numbers of scientists from the fields of SSH and natural sciences in the expert groups of the IPBES. The exchange of views at this workshop also considered the perspectives of experts working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A Programme Management Officer of the IPBES secretariat and ministerial representatives also attended the workshop. The findings of the workshop led to the development of a Biodiversity Policy (2016) by scientists who had attended the workshop. The brief was circulated at the fourth Plenary of the IPBES in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in February 2016. The Policy Brief also led to a number of associated exchanges of views which were published in correspondence in NATURE (Vadrot, Jetzkowitz, and Stringer 2016; Reuter, Timpte, and Nesshöver 2016; Larigauderie, Stenseke, and Watson 2016). These publications fit well into ongoing discussions on the disciplinary disparities existing within the IPBES since its establishment (e.g. Opgenoorth, Hotes, and Mooney 2014; Heffernan 2016; Montana and Borie 2016; Kovács and Pataki 2016).

An international meeting of the group of experts in September 2016 at the European Ecosystem Services Conference showed that there is agreement on the need to increase the involvement of SSH in the IPBES; however, the means of actively pushing for greater inclusion were also contested. The main controversy that emerged at the meeting in 2016 relates to the appropriateness of the urgency attributed to the lack of SSH and the means by which to ensure disciplinary balance within and beyond IPBES expert groups.

The IPBES is in its infancy, which implies several challenges to be addressed, but also opportunities to be used, such as the opportunity to tackle the problem of representation and inclusion of a diversity of scientific disciplines and knowledge holder’s right from the beginning. This is underpinned by the experiences made throughout the implementation of the first IPBES work programme.

Contents and structure of this special issue

The aims of this special issue are to stimulate this debate and to provide a basis from which to develop concrete measures on how to cope with disciplinary imbalance in expert groups and other IPBES activities. The development of this compilation of articles is a preliminary climax of the chain of activities that started in November 2015 in Bonn. The articles address different issues related to the role of SSH in the IPBES. Whilst some authors provide the reader with empirical data underpinning the necessity to increase the involvement of experts from SSH (Timpte et al. 2017), others discuss several issues related to the involvement of SSH expertise: the political framework, within which the IPBES operates (Jetzkowitz et al. 2017), The actual expectations associated with SSH (Vadrot et al. 2018), the particular role of economy and economic valuation systems (Vadrot et al. and Laurans 2017), and the practical dimension of implementation (Heubach and Lambini 2017; Keller et al. 2017). The essay by Marie Stenseke, member of the IPBES Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP) and Anne Larigauderie, Executive Secretary of the IPBES, introduces the special issue and provides the reader with a view from those who take active part in the organisation and implementation of the IPBES works (Stenseke and Larigauderie 2017).

In their contribution, Timpte et al. analyse the regional, educational, gender and disciplinary background of nominated and selected IPBES experts, by comparing these two groups. The authors identify several imbalances, which are visible in both groups, highlighting the need for diversity within the group of nominated experts in the first place. On the basis of an analysis of national proposal lists and against the background of the different national nomination and selection procedures the article identifies different factors (e.g. responsibility, timing, outreach channels, language, etc.) determining the effect of these processes on representation and inclusion within expert groups. Based on their findings, the paper presents recommendations on how better to engage knowledge holders from different disciplines and diverse knowledge systems into the IPBES process.

But, and this question remains an important one within this special issue, what is the kind of expertise and knowledge we are talking about? In their analysis, Jetzkowitz et al. 2017 address this question assuming that the discourse on biodiversity (including the IPBES debate) is incomplete without contributions from the social sciences and humanities. They relate their argument to the origins of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and propose a matrix as a means to structure the ambiguities and tensions inherent in the CBD. By linking these to their analysis of the commonalities and differences between the natural and social sciences, they conclude that the social sciences and humanities can contribute to the IPBES and biodiversity research by revealing the societal causes and drivers of environmental problems, contributing to problem-solving and the discourse on biodiversity and its meaning.

Heubach et al. draw their analysis of the role of the social sciences and humanities in IPBES on a particular case, namely the African regional assessment. The authors address the question whether scholars from social sciences and the humanities have been sufficiently involved in the assessment. Their analysis is based on the curriculum vitae of 97 members of the expert group and reveals that there is an overall lack of non-natural science perspectives and expertise leading to essential knowledge and data gaps in understanding the effects of the diverse human concepts of and activities on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The authors conclude that, in order to address these gaps, the IPBES needs to widen its outreach to networks of scholars from the social sciences and the humanities and to inform them appropriately about the specific roles they could play within IPBES processes, particularly within the production of its assessments.

Vadrot et al. amplify this view by pointing to the need for a better understanding of the divergent expectations associated with the involvement of experts from the social sciences and humanities. The authors argue that the contributions of the social sciences to IPBES can be of a very different nature, depending, for example, on the stage at which experts are involved, but also on the scope of an assessment and its objectives and contents. In order to understand better the diverse range of expectations and underlying assumptions on what the social science could do for and in relation to the IPBES the authors conduct a systematic literature review and develop a typology distinguishing different roles attributed to SSH experts and knowledge. They differentiate not only between three different roles, but also between three thematic areas and structure the potential contributions of SSH to the IPBES – including those that are less visible in current debates – accordingly. Based on the example of the role attributed to economy, they develop recommendations on how to fill current research gaps in our knowledge on the drivers and causes of biodiversity loss and how to develop measures for the uptake of such knowledge in IPBES.

Laurans' contribution complements this perspective by shedding light on the ‘two value systems’ inherent in the way in which the IPBES conceptual framework has approached ‘nature’s benefits to people’. The note discusses the economic value system, its proponents and arguments pointing to the shortcomings of economic valuation systems, including cost-benefit analysis and payments for ecosystem services. He analyses the usages of these instruments by development banks and agencies and identifies several challenges and opportunities inherent to current framings of economic valuation, including those inherent to the conceptual framework of the IPBES. He concludes that there is a need to understand the role of economists in the IPBES differently, namely in terms of ‘good candidates to bring up the material interests involved in the policy-making process that lead to biodiversity depletion (or protection).’

The research note by Keller et al. addresses the question of operationalisation and implementation of concepts provided by the IPBES and its conceptual framework at the national and regional level of policy-making. The authors aim to illustrate the challenges, needs, gaps and opportunities related to the policy implementation of concepts like Nature’s contributions to people (NCPs). They start from the assumption that the conceptualizations of biodiversity and ecosystem services differ among member states of the European Union and analyse the means by which the conceptualisation of NCPs provided by the Conceptual Framework of IPBES has been incorporated into national policies and its implementation. On the basis of the results of an online survey distributed among national IPBES focal points, the authors conclude that the knowledge needed to respond to the needs of implementing NCPs requires a particular type of knowledge production drawing on, but going beyond, interdisciplinarity.

The five articles and the one research note may be understood as contributions to the debate, identifying important topics, grounding their analyses in empirical work, analysing diverging perspectives, and sensing challenges and opportunities for inter- and multidisciplinary knowledge production to support current efforts to protect and sustainably use biodiversity. Most authors have contributed to the IPBES in one or another way, experiencing what it means to break boundaries for transforming how we think about, represent and treat nature. We are aware of the limitations of this special issue and hope to be able to trigger a debate, where scholars from other fields, other than those represented here – such as ethics, anthropology, history, cultural studies, arts or law – can join the debate and enrich the portfolio of concepts and instruments needed to transform our societies.

Alice B.M. Vadrot and Mariam Akhtar-Schuster

Editors of the Special Issue

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our appreciation to the German IPBES Coordination Office, located at the Project Management Agency of the German Aerospace Center in Bonn, Germany (DLR-PT) and funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for financial assistance to ensure open access to the articles of this special issue. We would like to thank Dr. Julia Kloos, Sapna Sidiqi and Uta von Witsch (German IPBES Coordination Office), and Dr. Ralph Wilhelm (DLR-PT) for their valuable assistance in the organisation of SSH expert meetings and in the process of analysing the outcomes of these meetings. We also thank Dr. Pauline Midgley (former Head of IPCC WGI TSU) for editing the editorial. Finally, we would like to thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), who supports the work of Dr Alice B.M. Vadrot with an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship (grant number: J-3704) and the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) for hosting Dr Vadrot.

ORCID

Alice Vadrot http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6043-9846