Governance has been identified by IPBES 2024 transformative change
assessment as one of the key indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, considered
human domination over nature and domination of the powerful over other people. We stress that if we want to transform the world and tackle the
challenges identified by IPBES, we need to transform the way how we imagine
and practice governance, and to bridge anthropocentric and eco-centric dualism
into a perspective where human and ecosystem well-being are tightly coupled
and recognised equally in the decision-making arena. In sum, our aim is to
enrich discussion on the new roles that can be imagined for governance as a
key lever for transformative change. Key question is how to navigate
transformative change for biodiversity and sustainability by integrating
multispecies agency as a new dimension aiming for multispecies co-existence
and justice in biodiversity governance. We build on comparative behavioural
studies from Horizon Europe projects Coevolvers and Innoforest, bringing
examples of learning communities in 13 EU regions and following development
of interactive agent-based modeling and common pool resource games.
Specifically, we developed the Ecopoly game, based on a semi-digital decision
model that simulate multi-actors action decision arena to trigger governance
innovations for sustainability, leading potentially to social learning in collective
gaming situations. Whether and what kind of change takes place is defined by
processes within the action arena. Ecopoly was played in the context of 13
comparable nature-related multispecies communities to simulate governance
situations which include co-evolution of values, beliefs, and interests. Results
based on comparison of sessions with vs. without nature as a governance
agency will be presented to provide argumentation for introducing a new
governance mode called "nature-based governance". It considers multispecies
actors and physical environments as active parts of governance arrangements
to be adaptive and reflexive for transformative change.
