The construction of biodiversity in conservation policy discourse: A multiscalar analysis

Background

Biodiversity policy must operate across global, national, and local scales, yet these scales often have competing priorities and unequal power. International targets and funding streams can shape how biodiversity problems and solutions are defined, sometimes marginalizing local perspectives in biodiversity‑priority countries such as those in Africa. There is growing concern that dominant biodiversity narratives simplify complex drivers of ecological change and disproportionately attribute responsibility to local communities rather than to structural and distant drivers. This article investigates why examining these narratives matters for making conservation policy more just and better aligned with on‑the‑ground realities.

Goals and Methods

This study aims to analyze how international-level biodiversity narratives and discourses (BNDs) influence domestic policy and local implementation, particularly in African contexts. The authors apply critical discourse analysis to a corpus of global and national conservation policies and reports, key informant interviews, and participant observation, focusing on how drivers of biodiversity loss are framed and how communities are represented within those framings. They coded materials in NVivo 12 using 17 codes, grouped into biodiversity status, perceptions of local communities, and conservation priorities. They assess inter-rater reliability using Cohen’s Kappa to ensure coding consistency.

Conclusions and Takeaways

The authors find that policies and reports emphasize biodiversity decline and frequently attribute loss to local practices such as smallholder agriculture, fuelwood collection, and hunting, while giving limited attention to large-scale structural drivers like international demand and commercial agriculture. This framing often assigns responsibility for biodiversity loss to local communities and domestic governments, portraying communities as both drivers of degradation and targets of education or behavior change interventions. This study concludes that conservation strategies must critically interrogate BNDs, foreground structural and tele-coupled drivers, and elevate local priorities and knowledge, offering practitioners a lens to design more equitable, context-sensitive policy and governance processes.