Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 158, February 2013, Pages 359-370
Biological Conservation

Does stakeholder involvement really benefit biodiversity conservation?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2012.08.018Get rights and content

Abstract

The establishment of protected areas, such as Natura 2000, is a common approach to curbing biodiversity loss. But many of these areas are owned or managed by private actors. Policies indicate that their involvement should be encouraged to ensure long term success. However, to date there have been no systematic evaluations of whether local actor involvement in the management of protected areas does in fact contribute to the conservation of biodiversity, which is the expressed policy goal. Research incorporating both qualitative and quantitative data was carried out in three case studies in Scotland where local actor input was required in the development and/or implementation of Natura 2000 management plans. No relationship was found between the characteristics of the process of stakeholder involvement and stakeholders’ perceptions of future biodiversity outcomes. Social outcomes of increased stakeholder involvement, such as increased trust, did however increase the perceived likelihood of positive future biodiversity outcomes. The findings indicate that efforts aimed at increasing stakeholder involvement in the management of protected areas need to consider making processes more independent, and acknowledge and address underlying biodiversity conflicts. The findings also emphasise the need to evaluate multi-level conservation efforts in terms of processes, social outcomes and biodiversity outcomes.

Highlights

► Increased stakeholder involvement does not necessarily lead to conservation success. ► Increased trust between stakeholders can increase conservation success. ► The independence of a process affects social and biodiversity outcomes. ► Underlying biodiversity conflicts need to be acknowledged and addressed. ► A mix of methods offers an effective way of evaluating stakeholder involvement.

Introduction

Stakeholder involvement is widely advocated in a range of policy activities including decision-making (Renn, 2006), policy implementation (e.g. Ferreyra and Beard, 2007, Huitema et al., 2010) and policy evaluation (Fischer, 2004). It has particularly gained ground in the environmental sector since the 1980s with the Brundtland report resulting in a trend towards more multi-level management of natural resources. As a result, such involvement is seen as “one of the fundamental prerequisites for the achievement of sustainable development” (UNCED, 1992: paragraph 23.2).

The main arguments for increased involvement are well known. Fiorino (1990) outlined three main types of argument for participation, namely normative, i.e. to strengthen democratic cultures and processes (Webler and Renn, 1995), substantive, i.e. to bring additional knowledge and values into decision-making in order to make better decisions (Renn, 2006) and instrumental, i.e. to provide greater legitimacy (Svarstad et al., 2006), increase trust (Munton, 2003), and reduce the intensity of conflicts (Young et al., 2010). These three types of argument for increased stakeholder involvement are highly relevant in the context of biodiversity governance. Indeed, anthropogenic pressures on ecosystem goods and services, combined with the current global financial crisis, are increasingly leading to the devolution of biodiversity governance through stakeholder involvement (Young et al., 2012). While this is an appealing concept due to the important substantive and instrumental benefits of such an approach (Carlsson and Berkes, 2005), it is essential, particularly in the current economic climate, to ensure that any public money spent on biodiversity conservation efforts, including processes to involve stakeholders at local levels, is being used effectively. The evaluation of stakeholder involvement is not only important for accountability and auditing purposes but, in line with the more normative and substantive arguments for stakeholder involvement, can help ensure fair representation and involvement; and increases our knowledge of human behaviour in these contexts (Rowe and Frewer, 2004). In view of these important goals, there is a growing body of work on evaluation of stakeholder involvement (Reed, 2008).

Many academic evaluations of stakeholder involvement focus on the processes of involvement (i.e. the normative goals of stakeholder involvement). Other evaluations focus on outcomes (linked to substantive and/or instrumental goals), be they social outcomes (such as increased trust, or conflict resolution) or policy outcomes (i.e. changes ‘on the ground’ that contribute to the achievement of the policy goal(s)). There is also a growing body of work suggesting and testing a combination of criteria relating to process, social outcomes (e.g. Berkes, 2009, Blackstock et al., 2007; Carlsson and Berkes 2005; Grant and Curtis, 2004) and environmental outcomes (Beierle and Konisky, 2001, Conley and Moote, 2003, Ferreyra and Beard, 2007).

There has, however, been less research evaluating the links between process, social outcomes and environmental outcomes. In their study on environmental planning in the Great Lakes region, Beierle and Konisky (2001) found that although stakeholder involvement had helped improve the quality of decisions and improved the relationships amongst stakeholders, there was no obvious link between stakeholder involvement and improved environmental quality. While Sultana and Abeyasekera (2008) found that social cohesion was slightly stronger and that stakeholder involvement had led to a faster uptake of community actions for fisheries management, no direct links were made between stakeholder involvement and improved environmental conditions. Newig and Fritsch (2009) explored the ability of participatory decision-making to deliver environmental policy output, compliance and implementation. Again, no direct links emerged, indicating this is an aspect of policy evaluation that requires further work (Burgess and Chilvers, 2006). In addition to the direct links between process and environmental outcomes, little is known about the indirect links between process, social and environmental outcomes (Kenney, 1999). Whereas conflict will hamper efforts to develop collaborative management strategies, good social outcomes may perhaps be more likely to lead to a greater willingness and better knowledge on the part of land owners and managers to engage, to assimilate new knowledge and want to adapt their activities in order to conserve biodiversity.

To test the direct and indirect links between stakeholder involvement and stakeholder perceptions of future biodiversity outcomes, this paper focuses on the implementation of the European Natura 2000 network of protected sites. Setting land aside for conservation dates back thousands of years and is recognised as an effective way of conserving biodiversity (Mulongoy and Chape, 2004). Consequently, protected areas have grown in range and extent since the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, covering 12.9% of the global terrestrial area (Jenkins and Joppa, 2009). As little “untouched” land remains and most ecosystems are, to a certain extent, shaped by if not directly dependent on humans, the president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature at the time concluded that “if local people do not support protected areas then protected areas cannot last” (Ramphal, 1993; cited in Warren, 2002: p. 196). This understanding together with the recognition of local stakeholder rights and democratisation of policy processes has resulted in a move from state-centred to multi-level governance of protected areas (Lockwood, 2010), which has been accompanied by the development of mechanisms to facilitate stakeholder involvement in the decision-making and management of protected areas. Protected areas therefore represent an appropriate setting in which to evaluate stakeholder involvement.

This paper provides qualitative and quantitative empirical evidence from stakeholders involved in the development and implementation of management plans on the direct and indirect links between stakeholder involvement and biodiversity outcomes. We provide evidence to inform biodiversity policy development and implementation, as well as wider academic debates, which would appear to have often run ahead of empirical studies of association. Using three in depth case studies of local stakeholder involvement in the development and/or implementation of biodiversity management plans in Scotland, this paper explores three main hypotheses to address the direct and indirect links between stakeholder involvement and perceived biodiversity outcomes. The first hypothesis was that process characteristics of stakeholder involvement would influence perceived biodiversity outcomes. The second hypothesis was that process characteristics of stakeholder involvement would influence social outcomes. Our third hypothesis was that social outcomes of stakeholder involvement processes would influence perceived biodiversity outcomes. These hypotheses are tested using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data derived from semi-structured interviews carried out with policy stakeholders in three case studies. The main results are then presented before discussing implications for stakeholder involvement in conservation and wider academic debates about stakeholder involvement processes and outcomes.

Section snippets

Study system

In the European Union, the main mechanism for protected areas is the Natura 2000 network, consisting of Special Protected Areas (SPAs) and Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) designated under the Birds and Habitats Directives respectively. Natura 2000 covers 17.5% of the EU’s territory, making it the largest network of protected areas in the world (European Commission, 2010). The majority of Natura 2000 sites are privately owned and their use is not primarily nature conservation. The European

Results based on the quantitative analysis

The most important variables in determining biodiversity scores, according to summed Akaike weights, were social group (SAW = 0.92) and independence (SAW = 0.82) (Fig. 2), with the remaining variables (influence: SAW = 0.61, representativeness: SAW = 0.40, and early involvement: SAW = 0.37) being less important. Model selection using AIC identified the best model as being that which contained independence and social group (Supplementary material Table E1), and both of these variables were statistically

Discussion

This study empirically tested the links between stakeholder involvement and perceived social and biodiversity outcomes in the context of protected area management using both qualitative and quantitative data. Five main findings emerged from the study.

Firstly, the study found mixed results when testing the assumption that the better the process the more likely “good” outcomes are to emerge (Rowe and Frewer, 2004). In two case studies (the Bladnoch and Forth and Borders), the views of

Conclusions

These results add to a small but growing body of work on the links between increased stakeholder involvement and conservation of biodiversity. Our findings emphasise the risks associated with the assumption that good processes are more likely to lead to good outcomes. This highlights the need for multi-dimensional evaluations incorporating process, social outcomes and biodiversity outcomes. Establishing direct links between stakeholder involvement processes and outcomes in biodiversity

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NERC CEH (Project NEC04049). We thank all interviewees who took part in this research, together with Adam Vanbergen and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the paper.

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