Guillaume Ollivier

Institutional entrepreneurship and techniques of inclusiveness in the creation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

This article contributes to understanding the conditions of social-ecological change by focusing on the agency of individuals in the pathways to institutionalization. Drawing on the case of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), it addresses institutional entrepreneurship in an emerging environmental science-policy institution (ESPI) at a global scale. Drawing on ethnographic observations, semistructured interviews, and document analysis, we propose a detailed chronology of the genesis of the IPBES before focusing on the final phase of the negotiations toward the creation of the institution. We analyze the techniques and skills deployed by the chairman during the conference to handle the tensions at play both to prevent participants from deserting the negotiations arena and to prevent a lack of inclusiveness from discrediting the future institution. We stress that creating a new global environmental institution requires the situated exercise of an art of “having everybody on board” through techniques of inclusiveness that we characterize. Our results emphazise the major challenge of handling the fragmentation and plasticity of the groups of interest involved in the institutionalization process, thus adding to the theory of transformative agency of institutional entrepreneurs. Although inclusiveness might remain partly unattainable, such techniques of inclusiveness appear to be a major condition of the legitimacy and success of the institutionalization of a new global ESPI. Our results also add to the literature on boundary making within ESPIs by emphasizing the multiplicity and plasticity of the groups actually at stake.

Evaluating the progress and needs of taxonomy since the Convention on Biological Diversity: going beyond the rate of species description

Abstract. There is a long tradition of assessing the activity and progress of taxonomy with quantitative indicators, such as, for example, number of taxonomists, species described and species collected. These evaluations play a key role in the context of a worldwide concern over biodiversity and its governance. We have described and analysed these evaluations since 1992, the year in which the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted. We showed that despite the establishment of a dedicated body inside the CBD (the Global Taxonomy Initiative), these quantitative evaluations are mostly sporadic and independent initiatives, performed by non-taxonomists. They do not map the places where most of the taxonomic activities take place, and they are performed on small scales, with scarce and heterogeneous sources of data, making comparisons almost impossible. Most of the indicators they use refer to the activity of species description. We argue that there is a need to rethink the way we evaluate taxonomy today and we discuss why it is urgent to move beyond indicators of species description. We suggest the use of a new set of indicators that would focus on taxonomic resources and dynamics, instead of taxonomic outputs.