N1. How to develop a "successful" environmental governance for the protection of biodiversity?

Christine Fürst (Martin-Luther University), christine.fuerst@geo.uni-halle.de

Luis Inostroza (Ruhr-University Bochum)

Daniele LaRosa (Universita di Catania)

Marcin Spyra (Martin-Luther University)

Summary

The symposium sheds light on the nexus between ownership in nature, value and governance systems and their impacts on biodiversity. We invite presentations that address changes in ownership forms and consequences for land use. Related value systems and governance instruments (legal, economic, rights and norm-based, community actions) should be analysed. Impacts on biodiversity should stretch over time series or consider significant changes in societal values and governance.

Description

With this symposium, we would like to open up an interdisciplinary forum considering how ownership, related value systems and governance instruments are connected considering their impacts on biodiversity. Ownership means the right to use or protect nature / natural resources related to or decoupled from land tenure. The symposium intends to enhance a highly integrative analysis on the level of the related social-ecological systems. It will compare in a global context how cause-effect relations in such systems contribute to conserving biodiversity or pose high risks for it in a global context.

The presentations in this symposium should shed light on the nexus between forms of ownership in nature, governance instruments (legal, economic, right / norm-based, community actions), value systems and biodiversity. Understanding this nexus in mainly important in regions with a highly intensive societal and environmental transformation. Examples are former Open Cast Mining areas, regions with changes from more family to industrial agriculture and transformations in urban and peri-urban contexts driven by different types of development processes (residential, infrastructural, commercial). Presentations can address, for instance, historical documents (cadastral data, legal and administrative texts, planning documents) related to land ownership and power balances in governing nature, data sets/bases from monitoring, observation networks, exploratories and any other kind of environmental surveys regarding proxies for biodiversity. Presentations are welcome considering processes of how historical data (e.g. documented surveys) and contemporary witnesses are included regarding how the changes in ownership and land governance have impacted the perception of the value of nature and can be connected with planning or management measures that impacted positively or negatively impacted the biodiversity proxies.

Also, approaches describing how expert opinion will be consulted to explore how different actor groups over time were or became players in using and governing nature and how they were and are involved in land use, management and planning are warmly invited.

Presentations might also address how the past and current state of biodiversity can be assessed by reviewing historical data in publications, collections and databases, which allow assessing the change in biodiversity as a function of land ownership and management, and of governance instruments.

In urban and peri-urban contexts presentations can investigate on the relation/trade-off between public and private land ownership, discussing and proposing different policy and planning instruments and support tools that could increase the amount of public spaces able to provide key ecosystem services. In result, we intend to develop a joint special issue in Social-Ecological Practice Research, thus, contributions from practical planners / regional development managers are also warmly welcome in this symposium.

Impact

We intend to publish a special issue in Social Ecological Practice Research (SEPR, Springer).