Mainstreaming biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people in Europe and Central Asia: insights from IPBES to inform the CBD post-2020 agenda

ABSTRACT

Recent global and regional assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) show that Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) are under an alarming threat due to the continuing loss of biodiversity. These assessments call for increasing conservation efforts and a more sustainable use of biodiversity to enhance the chances of halting biodiversity loss and reversing current trends. One of the strategies to achieve change is to mainstream biodiversity into sectoral policies. Mainstreaming, a concept that can be traced back to the Brundtland report, promotes the integration of the environment into political, societal, and economic planning and decision-making. Based on the review of key studies undertaken during the regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia, we develop a stepwise approach to analyze the current status of mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP. The approach can be used both for policy design purposes and diagnostic evaluations. It demonstrates that mainstreaming has the potential to improve the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity as well as the sustained provision of NCP. However, based on the status of implementation across Europe and Central Asia, we conclude that mainstreaming needs to be pursued and implemented in a stronger and more systematic way. The results of our assessment provide important input to national strategies and policies but also to the ongoing process of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity while developing the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

EDITED BY:

• Berta Martín-López

KEYWORDS:

• Biodiversity governance
• ecosystem services
• mainstreaming
• sector policies
• policy instruments

1. Introduction

Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP), which embody ecosystem services, are critically important for livelihoods, economies, and good quality of life, and are therefore vital to sustaining human life on earth (IPBES 2018a). Global and regional assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) show that NCP are under an alarming threat due to the continuing loss of biodiversity (IPBES 2018a; IPBES 2019). For Europe and Central Asia, the focus of the current article, IPBES (2018a) identified a continuous decline of biodiversity in line with increasing uniformity of species compositions in land- and seascapes. Consequently, the delivery of many NCP from wetlands, semi-natural grasslands, peatlands, freshwater, and coastal marine habitats has decreased.

While ecosystem protection has progressed in Europe and Central Asia, the biodiversity status is low, and trends remain negative overall (IPBES 2018a). Both the regional and the global assessments (IPBES 2019) call for increasing conservation efforts and a more sustainable use of biodiversity to enhance the chances of meeting national and international biodiversity targets. The IPBES global assessment emphasizes the need for a transformative change, which can be defined as an environmental governance approach with the capacity to manage, trigger and respond to regime shifts at a system level (Chaffin et al. 2016; IPBES 2019; Díaz et al. 2019). The goal of transformative change is to actively shift degraded ecosystems to alternative, more desirable, or more functional ones by altering the structure and processes that define the governance regime.

One of the strategies to achieve transformative change put forth in recent assessments is the mainstreaming of biodiversity into sectoral policies (IPBES 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; IPBES 2019). Mainstreaming, a concept that can be traced back to the Brundtland report (WCED 1987), promotes the integration of the environment into political, societal, and economic planning and decision-making. The concept has been further developed under the Convention on Biological Diversity and is ‘understood as ensuring that biodiversity, and the services it provides, are appropriately and adequately factored into policies and practices that rely and have an impact on it’. To facilitate further progress, a long-term strategic approach to mainstreaming (LTAM) was established at the fourteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 14) with the aim to integrate mainstreaming adequately into the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (CBD 2019) (https://www.cbd.int/mainstreaming/).

While many countries have at least partially integrated concerns for biodiversity and ecosystem services into key legal and policy documents, considerable room still exists for improvement to protect nature effectively in economic and policy sectors, and to actively support the mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP in private and public decision-making (IPBES 2018a). More recently, the European Union (EU) emphasized the importance of biodiversity for human well-being and development in the European Green Deal (COM/2019/640 final) and the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 (COM/2020/380 final). However, this is rather an exception, since the overall uptake of biodiversity and ecosystem services by clear policy objectives, to be achieved through concrete policy instruments, is still rather weak in many countries in Europe and Central Asia (Ring et al. 2018). The richness of terminology found in the literature with regard to the concept of mainstreaming makes it difficult to derive empirical insights from different studies and to provide guidance for public and private decision-makers on how to advance the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity and sustained provision of NCP (Visseren-Hamakers et al. 2015; Milner-Gulland et al. 2021).

This paper presents a novel approach to evaluate biodiversity mainstreaming, and the results of this approach. The aims of our paper are (i) to develop a scientific understanding of the mainstreaming concept, (ii) to propose a stepwise approach to analyze the mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP, (iii) to evaluate the current status of implementation with respect to mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP and (iv) to discuss promising options and opportunities for mainstreaming within seven key policy and economic sectors across Europe and Central Asia. Our paper is based on crucial insights from a systematic review of key studies undertaken as part of the IPBES regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia (Ring et al. 2018).

2. The mainstreaming concept

Governments traditionally react to policy problems by proposing and adopting specialized policy measures within specific economic sectors such as the forest and agriculture sector or policy sectors related to the environment and nature conservation. A sectoral approach can be effective as it fosters policy expertise and develops instruments and measures to effectively implement sector-related policies. However, due to the frequent lack of coordination across different policy sectors and the management of different ecosystems, governing through a sector-specific approach may lead to policy failures in terms of, for example, biodiversity loss and land degradation (IPBES 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2019; Willemen et al. 2020). Because of these failures, there is an intensified debate on how to enhance the relationships between global, national and local policies as well as on how to develop effective approaches to implement these policies (Visseren-Hamakers et al. 2015).

One such approach is based on the concept of mainstreaming, a political strategy with the objective to integrate the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in all steps of decision-making at all levels (Dalal-Clayton and Bass 2009). Principle 4 of the Rio Declaration already stated that environmental protection is ‘an integral part of the development process and cannot be considered in isolation from it’ (UN 1992; see also UNCED 1992 Agenda 21 ch. 8). Since then, mainstreaming is one of the major goals of the UN and can be found as a strategy to achieve objectives in, for example, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and relevant Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2015). Partial progress has also been made towards mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP as well as identifying and managing the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss, by developing biodiversity strategies and action plans at multiple levels (IPBES 2018a). Initial environmental mainstreaming efforts were made to include the environment into national planning to ‘ensure that economic decisions, policies, and plans took environmental priorities into account and addressed the impact of human activities on environmental services and assets’ (Benson et al. 2014, p. 60). The concept has also been used to insert environmental issues into development plans such as poverty-reduction strategies (Bizikova et al. 2015). Conceptual guidance for environmental mainstreaming can be found in literature focusing on development (Grima et al. 2017), gender issues (Rönnblom 2005), and more lately on climate policy (e.g. Brouwer et al. 2013; Redford et al. 2015; Whitehorn et al. 2019) and the incorporation of ecosystem service values into accounting systems (Dasgupta 2021; Tinch et al. 2021).

Despite its widespread application, mainstreaming remains associated with some conceptual confusion. The European Environment Agency (2005, p. 12), for example, uses environmental mainstreaming more or less interchangeably with environmental policy integration. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD 2011a, p. 5) used to define mainstreaming as ‘the integration of the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in both cross-sectoral plans […] and in sector-specific plans […]. It implies changes in development models, strategies and paradigms’.

Although the two processes of environmental mainstreaming and environmental policy integration may be interlinked, a qualitative difference exists between the two. The basic idea of mainstreaming is not to integrate across sectors but to move ‘environmental issues from the periphery to the center of decision-making, whereby environmental issues are reflected in the very design and substance of sectoral policies’ (Hauer 2017). Wamsler et al. (2014, p. 190) define mainstreaming as ‘incorporating new aspects into existing core work’, and that the incentive for mainstreaming stems ‘from the need to change the dominant paradigm’. Benson et al. (2014, p. 606) state that environmental mainstreaming has developed as a strategy focusing on the ‘greening’ of non-environmental sectors. Environmental mainstreaming has been developed for the (systematic) incorporation of environmental issues into a specific sector (Nunan et al. 2012), while environmental policy integration focuses on cooperation of diverse actors in coordinating policies across traditional sectors or policy domains (Jordan and Lenschow 2010). Lately, integration has assumed a broader meaning, focusing on the need to adopt a holistic or overarching approach to the integration of policies. Examples of such approaches are resilience thinking, the robustness of socio-ecological systems, or reflexive governance (Folke et al. 2002). In relation to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the mainstreaming concept has been conceptually further developed to distinguish it more clearly from other concepts such as environmental policy integration.

A number of studies have analyzed how mainstreaming happens in practice. Nunan et al. (2012) argue that environmental mainstreaming can occur through two interlinked mechanisms or pathways: vertical and horizontal mainstreaming. Vertical mainstreaming refers to a top-down integration process of environmental concerns into a specific sector’s policy, often guided by a governmental body (Nunan et al. 2012; Wamsler et al. 2014). Horizontal mainstreaming occurs via temporary arrangements, such as task forces and liaison groups, and depends on the expertise and technical knowledge available within sectors (Nunan et al. 2012, p. 266). Wamsler et al. (2014) further elaborate on the vertical and horizontal mainstreaming mechanisms by adding six different mainstreaming strategies (add-on, programmatic, inter- and intra-organizational, regulatory, managerial, and directed mainstreaming) to be able to analyze how various coordination-related activities may create synergies that increase the chance of successful environmental mainstreaming.

Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al. (2018) identify barriers to and levers for mainstreaming biodiversity into economic sectors that exert high levels of pressure on biodiversity. The findings highlight the importance of considering both the specific governance context of the sector, as well as external factors such as broader institutional capacity, public opinion, and socio-economic conditions. The former may in general be handled by the actors involved in the sector, while the latter may be out of reach for mainstreaming efforts. As indicated above, the empirical insights on how countries in Europe and Central Asia have mainstreamed the concerns underpinning the concept of biodiversity and NCP into key policy documents and strategies is still limited due to the rather scattered studies and results primarily based on individual cases instead of comparative studies. Furthermore, the mixing of mainstreaming and policy integration efforts makes it hard to assess any progress. With the clarification of the mainstreaming concept and our proposed stepwise approach to analyze the mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP, i.e. the systematic incorporation of biodiversity and NCP into sector policies, we will improve the possibilities to evaluate the current implementation status of mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP into sector policies within countries as well as between countries.

3. Methods

The method presented here consists of an approach to assess mainstreaming that can be used both for policy design purposes and diagnostic evaluations (see Figure 1). The approach was developed as part of the IPBES assessment for Europe and Central Asia in the evaluation of governance options (for details, see Ring et al. 2018). The assessment started with the identification of the sectors to be analyzed. The policies considered related to conservation, environment, economic sectors (namely the primary sector, including agriculture and fisheries), the secondary sector (including resource extracting), manufacturing, and services (e.g. health). The assessment included scientific and grey literature up to 2017. Databases, such as the web of knowledge, were used to identify potentially relevant literature, complemented by information from websites of governmental and non-governmental organizations.

Figure 1. Flowchart of the six phases used to develop the methodological approach for assessing mainstreaming in sectors and designing policies.

We performed a structured scoping review (Tricco et al. 2016), following an a priori developed protocol to collect and describe evidence. With a focus on each sector considered, the following questions guided the analysis:

• What are the main policy objectives?

• What policy instruments or combinations of policy instruments are used to govern the policy sector?

• What kind of governance mode is currently and predominantly governing the policy sector?

• What are the key constraints or opportunities related to these policies, governance modes, and instruments?

• Where can we see improvements, and how and where is mainstreaming within sectors and at different scales still needed?

• Where do instruments complement each other, where do they lead to synergies or to conflicts, which compromise policy goals?

The results were first synthesized in individual sector analyses and then compared. We developed the stepwise approach, motivated by Strategic Goal A of the Aichi Targets (CBD 2011b), which aims to ‘address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss by mainstreaming biodiversity across government and society’. Based on these targets, and the results of the review, we identified three necessary key steps to be able to assess the current state of mainstreaming in sector policies as follows (see Table 1):

• Raising awareness of the human dependence on natural resources and NCP (incl. provisioning of information, enhancing capacity building and strengthening participation).

• Defining policy objectives related to the ecological, economic, and socio-cultural requirements for achieving a sustainable living.

• Designing instruments and policy mixes to support the implementation of mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP in public and private decision-making able to achieve the satisfaction of human needs.

Table 1. Policy options and opportunities for mainstreaming biodiversity and Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) in Europe and Central Asia. Building on three key steps to assess the current status of mainstreaming, options and opportunities for mainstreaming are provided for seven policy and economic sectors in Central Asia and Europe’s three subregions. The table synthesizes those policy options and opportunities from the sector analyses of the IPBES regional assessment report that are relevant to all sectors. The evidence shows (i) that biodiversity and nature conservation will benefit from being mainstreamed in environmental policies as well as all economic sectors and their respective policies and (ii) that NCP will benefit from being mainstreamed in all economic sectors, as well as the conservation sector. Source: Ring et al. 2018; IPBES 2018a; 2018b, p. 38-39.

The results of the literature review are displayed for four subregions: Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The division into subregions was primarily made for communication and dissemination reasons. We complemented the assessment of the available – but sometimes limited – literature with in-depth knowledge provided by country and sector experts involved in the assessment.

The categories for assessing the current state of options and opportunities of actual governance were developed during the assessment process as a collaborative effort by the team of experts. Based on the outcome of the assessment we identified four categories that capture the current state of mainstreaming: i) effectively implemented; meaning, for example, that an option is applied in the relevant region, works well, and delivers the results intended, ii) implemented with scope for improvement; meaning, for example, that an option is applied in the relevant region, but does not yet deliver the results intended, iii) under development or started and iv) not yet initiated. In addition to the four categories, we also indicate in Table 1 when an option is not applicable to a sector or not assessed. Despite of our efforts to integrate the best available knowledge and expertise, data limitations in terms of lack of literature and limited representation of experts need to be considered when interpreting the results, in particular relating to some countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

4. Results

The results of the assessment of the current state of knowledge regarding mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP in seven policy and economic sectors in Europe and Central Asia are synthesized in Table 1. It demonstrates that many countries in Europe and Central Asia have, at least partially, integrated the concerns of biodiversity and NCP into key policy documents and strategies (Ring et al. 2018).

Table 1 also shows that there is ample room for improvement with respect to current practices and policy changes needed to achieve future goals. In other words, existing policies and strategies are underperforming in terms of achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets but also the Sustainable Development Goals (CBD 2014; IPBES 2018a). It also means that there are many opportunities to close the gap between current practice and changes needed by promoting more effective, efficient, and equitable policies, where mainstreaming can play a prominent role. The following subsections illustrate the potential to improve mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP through various options and opportunities related to the three key steps: raising awareness, defining policy objectives, and designing instruments and policy mixes.

4.1. Step 1: raising awareness, providing information, and strengthening participation

Since the adoption of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, large efforts have been made to raise awareness and to integrate stakeholders and the wider public into the governance of biodiversity and NCP, for example, through public debate, communication and knowledge sharing as well as public participation, organizational and individual learning, and capacity building (Schröter et al. 2014; Kareiva et al. 2015). Although these efforts have led to substantial progress, our assessment shows that there are significant opportunities to further raise awareness of the role of biodiversity and NCP across all the studied sectors, particular in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Table 1).

Promising opportunities to raise awareness, strengthen participation, and transparency in decision-making processes achieve, among other things, (i) to make the diverse values of NCP visible through accounting and valuation of ecosystem services, (ii) to show trade-offs and tipping points, as well as (iii) to demonstrate the impact of changing production and consumption patterns. There is, for example, a long tradition in both the forestry and the fisheries sectors to closely monitor the use of forest land and fishing waters to assess or diagnose the current use of the respective resources. Although somewhat contested, these monitoring activities are closely linked to policy and planning both at a societal and individual level, and are further strengthened by the implementation of certification standards (Olschewski et al. 2018; see Box 1).

Box 1. Awareness raising, monitoring and participation in the forestry sector.

Forests have contributed to human welfare throughout history. For centuries, the focus has been on extracting wood, which has often led to overexploitation and forest loss. Consequently, the question of how to sustainably manage forest resources gained importance, and monitoring systems were developed in many countries to provide the necessary information base (Gschwantner et al. 2022). While at the beginning, the volume of growing stock was the most important attribute to be measured, today other variables, related to wood supply, carbon storage and biological diversity, are often included in the monitoring activities (Vidal et al. 2016). However, first attempts to include social indicators, such as people’s preferences or recreational behavior, have been made only recently (Hegetschweiler et al. 2022). A further endeavor is to harmonize and standardize monitoring approaches at the international level (Atkinson et al. 2020). These approaches can contribute, together with other options, to raising awareness and fostering participation, to informing better decision making, and to supporting the sustainable use of forest resources and their contributions to people. Table 1 (Step 1) shows that in Western and Central Europe several measures have already been implemented. However, measures are mainly only under development or have just recently started in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

More general economic indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), are currently not able to reflect all dimensions of NCP and a good quality of life (Schleyer et al. 2015; Dasgupta 2021). Therefore, further options are needed to measure national welfare and sustainable development. Moving towards ‘measuring what we manage’ will facilitate the comparison between sectors as well as interaction and coordination among them (TEEB 2009). A key point of attention is the interaction between environmental accounting and policy, and how accounting systems can provide guidance for ‘real-world policy-making’ (Jakob and Edenhofer 2015). Indeed the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 places a strong emphasis on the quantitative measurement of ecosystems and their services and values, and their incorporation into accounting and reporting systems used by business and the public sector.

4.2. Step 2: defining policy objectives

Although most countries in Europe and Central Asia have adopted a vast number of environmental policy objectives by applying multilateral environmental agreements (Widerberg and Pattberg 2015), a fragmented international treaty system, in combination with slow implementation (Susskind and Ali 2015), impede the compliance with, and enforcement of the agreements in most of the analyzed sectors. Hence, there is an urgent need among public but also private decision makers to more clearly commit to the multilateral environmental agreements and to identify overarching policy objectives, balance competing demands and develop compliance incentives in combination with financing mechanisms to help improve the situation in all the analyzed sectors.

The ecosystem service concept and the further developed concept of NCP offer a useful framework to identify policy objectives and contribute to detecting limits for trading off one service for another, beyond which intended substitution can lead to catastrophic results (Bastian et al. 2007; Rockström et al. 2009; Simoncini 2009; Jax 2014; Mace et al. 2014). However, studies of the forestry and agricultural sectors, for example, show that the same ecosystem processes and components often provide diverse bundles of services simultaneously, which can make it difficult to set coherent sector policy objectives (Olschewski et al. 2018; Simoncini et al. 2019). Thus, there is a need to both vertically and horizontally mainstream biodiversity into sector policies as specified by Nunan et al. (2012).

To meet this demand, integrated governance arrangements to achieve transformational change have been developed for landscape, resource, water and coastal management, as well as at bioregional scales for energy management (IPBES 2019). Integrated spatial planning has also been identified as a strong instrument to explore spatial implications of combined policies on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and to design synergistic solution strategies (Albert et al. 2020; see Box 2).

Box 2. Integration through spatial planning.

Spatial planning can influence the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and NCP in diverse ways (Albert et al. 2020). When spatial planning disregards nature considerations, for example, by suggesting new road infrastructure in valuable habitat, it may impair biodiversity and ecosystem services through effects such as soil sealing and fragmentation. In contrast, planning has positive impacts when its plans and strategies carefully synthesize and consider best available knowledge on spatial dimensions of biodiversity and ecosystem services (Opdam et al. 2013; Longato et al. 2021). Spatial planning can be reactive, forming a keystone instrument to assess the spatial implications of combined policies on nature (Rozas-Vásquez et al. 2018). A pro-active, targeted approach to planning (Bateman et al. 2013) that is integrated across disciplines, sectors and scales can propose solution strategies that exploit synergies for people and nature (Albert et al. 2016). In concert with other legal and regulatory instruments, integrated spatial planning can form the backbone of policy mixes facilitating effective actions for safeguarding, enhancing or restoring biodiversity and NCP (see Table 1, Step 2). Planning in consideration of nature can also facilitate participation, foster stewardship, and provide the basis for targeted investments, for instance, to identify opportunities for nature-based solutions (Schmidt et al. 2022; Hynes et al. 2022) or areas for results-oriented agri-environmental payments (Galler et al. 2015). In sum, integrated spatial planning is being implemented although there remains scope for improvement (Table 1, Step 2) in Western and, partly, Central Europe, while there is still a long way to go in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Furthermore, integrated policies are to be taken into account, as well as consumption and production processes at local, regional, and national levels. Impacts displaced to foreign countries (e.g. telecoupling) also need to be considered. Some examples are (i) land-use policies to enforce and regulate transnational land acquisitions (‘land-grabbing’) (Rulli et al. 2013); (ii) regulation and monitoring of conflict-free mineral trade (Young et al. 2014); and (iii) the adoption of ‘principles for responsible agro-investment’ (Deininger and Byerlee 2011). There is also a number of policy-support tools specifically dedicated to checking for consistency between objectives, instruments, and potentially adverse impacts from one to another strategy, policy, program, or individual project (IPBES policy support gateway: IPBES 2021). Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) and environmental impact assessment (EIA) provide promising options to raise mainstreaming attention for biodiversity and NCP across a wider range of sectors, beyond environment and conservation (Geneletti 2013; Helming et al. 2013; Lamorgese and Geneletti 2013). Likewise, expanding interest in environmental-economic accounting, being led by the UN and its Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) exercise, which seeks to consider ecosystem-related goods and services in a more transparent manner in national income accounts, should further improve mainstreaming and result in more sustainable development focused policy making (Chen et al. 2020).

4.3. Step 3: designing, implementing, and assessing instruments and policy mixes

Mainstreaming can contribute to overcoming various institutional failures causing biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation by designing and implementing different policy instruments and tools (TEEB 2010; Muradian and Rival 2012; Parks and Gowdy 2013; Costanza et al. 2014; Kenter et al. 2015). In the third step, we assessed specific policy instruments belonging to the categories (i) legal and regulatory instruments; (ii) economic and financial instruments; (iii) social and information-based instruments; and (iv) rights-based instruments and customary norms (IPBES 2015a, 2015b) in the realm of biodiversity and NCP. Policy instruments are embedded in quite heterogeneous and complex systems involving multiple actors and governance levels (Buizer et al. 2011; Paloniemi et al. 2015), and different future pathways and scenarios (IPBES 2018a). This often calls for a policy mix embedded in specific institutional settings, which makes it difficult to assess these instruments in an isolated way. A policy mix aims to overcome the flaws of single instruments with respect to effectiveness, efficiency, and equity, while highlighting the functional role of the relevant instrument in the mix (Schröter-Schlaack and Ring 2011). Such a policy mix could start top-down with the design of regulatory instruments based on socio-ecological indicators in the proximity of tipping points, to assure a minimum sustainable provision of NCP. Beyond this point, ecosystem service delivery could be further enhanced by applying economic, financial, and information-based instruments, including bottom-up approaches. Box 3 provides an example of the development of a policy mix in pasture management in Kyrgyzstan since 2009.

Table 2. Policy instruments in pasture management in Kyrgyzstan.

Legal and regulatory instruments	Economic and financial instruments	Social and information-based instruments	Rights-based instruments and customary norms
Pasture Law (2009) Pasture use and management planning Pasture use monitoring	Pasture fee and land tax Grants to pasture committees and pasture unions	Information regarding pastures (e.g. distribution, state) Awareness building and trainings organized by NGOs and extension services	Pasture collective rights Customary norms and institutions

Source: Ring et al. (2018).

Box 3. Policy mix for pasture management in Kyrgyzstan.

In Central Asia, decentralization policies have been introduced with the objective of promoting the sustainable use of natural resources. For instance, Kyrgyzstan has decentralized the authority for pasture management to the newly created ‘political local level’, thereby strengthening self-governance through pasture user unions and pasture committees (Kasymov et al. 2016). An important feature of the latest pasture reform is that a mix of policy instruments was developed after the Pasture Law was approved by the Kyrgyzstan parliament in 2009 and tested while the reform was implemented (Table 2). One of the first tasks for each newly established pasture committee was the collection of pasture fees and the allocation of pasture tickets to pasture users (the financial policy instrument). The collected pasture fees finance the pasture committee’s overhead costs and are invested in pasture infrastructures and improvement. The pasture fee is defined annually by the pasture committee for each type of livestock and pasture. It needs to be approved by the respective municipality. A pasture ticket is allocated according to annual pasture use and a management plan (the regulatory policy instrument), which is developed and implemented under the coordination of the responsible pasture committee. The capacity and condition of pastures, their productivity, level of land degradation, and the size of livestock populations need to be monitored and assessed annually (regulatory and information-based policy instruments) by pasture committees as a basis for negotiations concerning the allocation of pastures for the following year’s pasture use plan.

In principle, legal and regulatory instruments contribute to the implementation of all policies, including mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP. Table 1 shows that they are widely applied in Europe and Central Asia. However, balancing practical flexibility and legal certainty in the design and implementation of these instruments is necessary to ensure their effectiveness and efficiency (Garmestani et al. 2013; IPBES 2015b). At the same time, direct regulations are seen to be less effective. Here, Santos et al. (2015) emphasize the limited ability to have an impact on broader land-use patterns and pressures undermining biodiversity and ecosystem services, while others doubt that regulations are flexible enough and able to appropriately deal with current environmental problems (Harring 2014). As an example, enhancing landscape diversity is sometimes hindered by regulations that forbid or strongly limit converting woodland to agricultural land (Agnoletti 2006). Although regulatory instruments are the backbone of policy mixes, one key factor constraining the effectiveness of existing environmental governance arrangements is limited enforcement, owing to a lack of institutional capacities, financial means, or corruption.

Economic and financial instruments complement existing regulatory and other policy instruments through approaches to balance conservation benefits and costs between actors and regions. Given that in existing markets NCP are often undervalued, these instruments incorporate the values of ecosystems into decision-making through corrected price signals. However, beside taxation, economic and financial instruments currently play a minor role in mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP in Europe and Central Asia (Table 1). Reforming environmentally harmful subsidies in sectors negatively affecting ecosystems is necessary for cost-effectively assigning public expenditures to reach conservation objectives. Innovative economic and financial instruments include payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity offsets and habitat banking, tax reliefs, ecological fiscal transfers, and integrated funding for biodiversity and climate change adaptation. Economic and financial instruments need to be customized to national and local conditions to provide cost-effective means for achieving conservation targets, while considering social impacts. They need to be implemented with caution as they can have (unintended) social consequences and can also be detrimental to efforts to maintain and restore biodiversity and NCP, for example, when promoting intensification of agricultural and forest land use (Ring et al. 2018).

Our assessment also shows that social and information-based instruments, which consider the interdependence of ecosystems and socio-cultural dynamics for successful environmental management at the local, national, or regional level, are widely underutilized in Europe and Central Asia (Table 1). The same holds for rights-based instruments, which despite being at the very center of the adopted UN SDGs, require further efforts to ensure that they are fully compliant with the fundamental principles of good governance. They also fall short in terms of their ability to deliver equalized power relations and in the facilitation of capacity building to ensure that conservation practice respects rights in all cases and supports their further realization where possible (Campese et al. 2009; IPBES 2018a). Our assessment shows that these types of instruments are rarely implemented and there are huge knowledge gaps in terms of their usage in several sectors. However, some of these policy instruments are partly considered within the conservation policy sector (Table 1).

5. Discussion

Current sustainability transitions, sector policies and potential future governance options for biodiversity and NCP mainstreaming demonstrate a clear gap between the identified state-of-the-art and desired pathways and policy objectives (IPBES 2018a; Simoncini et al. 2019; Whitehorn et al. 2019; Šumrada et al. 2020). The concept of sustainability transitions has emerged as an approach for both conceptualizing and fostering the radical change that is needed to achieve sustainable development (Kelly et al. 2021). Our assessment suggests that mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP is critical to achieve such transitions but remains a challenge across Europe and Central Asia. Nevertheless that progress in some countries can provide direction and momentum for other countries now and in the future. Hence, and as identified under the CBD post-2020 agenda (CBD 2019), mainstreaming can play a prominent role in closing the gap between policy ambitions and current practice. However, there are several reasons why biodiversity protection and the sustainable use of NCP are more of a side stream rather than the mainstream (Martens et al. 2003).

We have identified at least three main reasons broadly underlying the difficulties of biodiversity mainstreaming: (i) insufficient political commitment; (ii) a lack of enabling legal frameworks and policy mixes; and (iii) a need for governance arrangements for transformative change.

Although many countries are committed to international biodiversity policies, which explicitly recommend mainstreaming as an approach to protect biodiversity, there seems to be a lack of adequate political will and sustained leadership in the incorporation of biodiversity considerations and NCP into economic sectors (IPBES 2018a). Non-binding political commitments in combination with a lack of financial resources mean that the issue of mainstreaming tends to be low down on the political agenda. Mainstreaming is not only a technical exercise but involves severe goal conflicts. Thus, it is dependent on a strong political commitment to solve difficult key problems, including fulfilling the dimensions of sustainability as well as several SDGs simultaneously (Nunan et al. 2012). To help guide and accelerate mainstreaming in policy and economic sectors there is a need (i) to initiate social change and establish transformative capacity among stakeholders, and (ii) to mobilize political commitment as well as adequate funding – a role that needs to be taken up in tandem by public and private policy-makers at all levels.

While mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP in individual sectors is important, simultaneous implementation in several sectors increases the chances of achieving overall biodiversity and NCP objectives, thereby avoiding unintended consequences and spillover effects by activities performed in other sectors. Hence, it is important to develop a more coherent and enabling legal framework and policy mixes to respond effectively to biodiversity loss and broader sustainable development challenges. Policy needs to create incentives and recognize rights and responsibilities to engage local governments and communities, individuals, indigenous peoples, entrepreneurs, and others to take action for biodiversity. The challenge is to design governance arrangements that overcome the flaws and account for different ecosystems with diverse actors and multiple objectives involved within and across Europe and Central Asia. Furthermore, multiple drivers, sectors and governance levels have to be considered. In addition, existing policy regimes and sectoral policies already in place have a decisive impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of new instruments to be implemented. Thus, there is a need for more systematic comparative analyses and empirical evidence to specify the interaction between new and existing or traditional measures (Jordan et al. 2013), across different ecosystems and multiple governance levels.

Mainstreaming as a concept has been criticized for not being radical enough in terms of changing from business as usual to the transformation needed to halting biodiversity loss and reversing current trends (Wilson 2016). Yet mainstreaming has the potential to be an important cornerstone of societal transformation, but both are dependent on political commitment and enabling legal frameworks and policy mixes. Hence, governance itself also has to change as mainstreaming and societal transformation require new governance approaches, which provide an enhanced capacity to manage change. How we choose to organize our societies – both the public and the private spheres – is thus key for the realization of mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP. The literature on governance towards sustainability focuses in particular on finding promising governance modes (or mixes of modes) suitable to promote sustainable development (Lange et al. 2013). Our assessment shows that new modes of governance, such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, collaborative, or private forms of governance, increasingly emerge in parallel to traditional hierarchical governance. They allow a better involvement of different actors in policy and decision-making with the aim of promoting shared responsibility for our common future. However, due to the intrinsic complexity of human societies, there is no single panacea for successful governance of biodiversity and NCP (Ostrom et al. 2007). Nevertheless, the various approaches to governance of complexity share important characteristics, since they all promote policy processes that stimulate adaptation and learning. Hence, to take up the challenge of successfully governing complexity and better adapting policies and instruments to specific contexts, approaches of biodiversity conservation and mainstreaming into sectoral policies, programs and strategies need to be seen as experiments that require governance and management for change, rather than against change, and systematic continuous monitoring and evaluation (Rist and Moen 2013). This can be achieved incrementally through adaptive governance and management and the systematic improvement of policy implementation (Hasselman 2017), or via transition or transformation governance and management, and the organization of evolutionary processes of societal change (Mårald et al. 2017; IPBES 2019, Díaz et al. 2019; Visseren-Hamakers and Kok 2022). Regardless of whether governments choose a more incremental or a more rapid transformative path to the future, mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP along the three key steps of raising awareness, defining policy objectives, and designing instruments and policy mixes (Table 1) is crucial to the success of this endeavor.

6. Conclusion

Our assessment of options for mainstreaming biodiversity and NCP into policy and economic sectors in Europe and Central Asia shows that mainstreaming has the potential to improve the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity as well as the sustained provision of NCP. We argue that this is absolutely essential for reversing the current rapid rate of biodiversity loss. However, and as identified under the CBD post-2020 agenda, mainstreaming needs to be done and implemented in a stronger and more systematic way (see also Nunan et al. 2012; CBD 2019). The three steps of assessing the current status of mainstreaming, which include (i) raising awareness, (ii) defining clear and distinct policy objectives and, finally, (iii) designing instruments and policy mixes, provide not only guiding principles for policy design, but also a diagnostic assessment approach to support concrete advice on what measures work where, when, and how in all the assessed policy and economic sectors (Ring et al. 2018).

Our assessment emphasizes the need to identify barriers and opportunities for mainstreaming biodiversity into policy and economic sectors that exert high pressure on biodiversity. Key barriers include a lack of political will and inappropriate legal frameworks as well as policy mixes to respond effectively to biodiversity loss and broader sustainable development challenges. The key opportunities include developing strategies and policies based on integrative, inclusive, participatory, and adaptive governance principles to address policy incoherence, as well as the recognition of trade-offs and the creation of synergies (IPBES 2018a, 2019; Turney et al. 2020).

The insights from this assessment can inform the creation of national biodiversity mainstreaming strategies and policies. At the same time, the findings can be instructive for the ongoing international process of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity towards the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (Locke et al. 2019; Phang et al. 2020). Putting biodiversity mainstreaming center stage in those efforts provides promising opportunities to substantially advance more positive futures for people and nature.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the IPBES Europe and Central Asia Expert Group and Technical Support Unit for all their input, support, and collaboration during the assessment process. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.