Nature as a Political Enactment Within the Global Biodiversity Debate and a Plea for a Process-Inspired  Transition Governance

Abstract: A revolution is brewing within global biodiversity governance as attempts to govern and to deal with biodiversity loss have not led to any substantial results. The underlying drivers of biodiversity loss keep adding to the total ecological predicament which in turn sets in motion an epistemological paradigm shift (episteme) with a call for transformative change. This shift of episteme confronts Western modern ways of thinking and challenges to leave bifurcated views of Nature behind. This leads to a shift in the great conservation debate towards a new Anthropocene conservation debate, where new discursive positions arise stressing to move beyond nature-culture dichotomies and beyond capitalism. These positions challenge the reformist and prosaic mainstream conservation regime of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) with its tendency for rational problem-solving and incremental adjustments.  Contemporary process philosophers are now also creating their own discursive niche position within academia as “Earth bound”. This study draws from this position to shed a different light on the new Anthropocene conservation debate. It outlines how a “dogmatic image of thought” and how “the fallacy of the bifurcation of Nature” have created the conditions for the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss maintaining the mainstream conservation regime. “Living in harmony with nature” and “bending the curve of biodiversity loss” prove to be useful synergetic epistemic notions to break out of the dogmatic image and to leave bifurcation behind. Process-relational thinking can help understand how transition governance can support new policies that aim to create cross-scale alignments for local action within international negotiations.  Therefore, this study proposes a renewed process-inspired transition governance, which could help to find capacities that have yet remained unexercised. Based on speculative methods creating social-ecological imaginaries, these capacities can be discovered but this requires the global conservation community to see beyond the dogmatic image and bifurcation in the journey to living in harmony with nature in 2050, for which the epistemic notions of “living in harmony with nature” and “bending the curve of biodiversity loss” could turn out to be useful synergetic starting points.