Biodiversity Governance: Analyzing Non-State and Sub-National Cooperative Initiatives in Latin America

Abstract

Non-state and subnational actors have long been identified as important agents taking action to address biodiversity loss, and have more recently been integrated into formal international biodiversity governance. However, our understanding of these cooperative initiatives for biodiversity is largely based on mappings limited to information available in English. It is possible that initiatives in highly biodiverse non-English speaking countries are underrepresented in the literature. Consequently, we aim develop a better understanding of the institutional landscape of biodiversity governance in Latin America (LA) by mapping initiatives involving non-state and subnational actors. Many countries in LA are biodiversity hotspots, therefore the relevance of this research. To achieve our goal, we draw on a well-established methodology for mapping the institutional landscape of biodiversity governance. We collected data examining databases and applying snowballing for adding initiatives using Spanish and Portuguese as their main language. The data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics, observing, among others, LA countries and actors involved, link to biodiversity, type of actors, and accountability mechanisms. Our results show that Brazil, Colombia and Peru host the highest number of initiatives, whilst Cuba, Venezuela and Paraguay have the least. The most active actors come from Civil Society Organizations (CSO) whereas the least active come from the business arena. Accountability mechanisms are underdeveloped and few initiatives explicitly mentioned the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Sustainable Development Goals. These results improve our understanding of the biodiversity governance landscape in LA, enabling governments and CSO to act on a solid basis to improve it.

Keywords: Biodiversity, international and transnational cooperative initiatives, Latin America.