The foucauldian approach to conservation: pitfalls and genuine promises.

Conservation biology is a branch of ecology devoted to conserving biodiversity. Because this discipline is based on the assumption that knowledge should guide actions, it endows experts with a power that should be questioned. The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) can be seen as a relevant conceptual resource to think these aspects of conservation biology through. I critically analyse the relevance of the Foucauldian approach to conservation. I argue that Foucauldian arguments are deeply ambiguous, and therefore useless for conservation purposes, unless they are supplemented with unsaid assumptions that are, depending on the case at hand, untenable, or at least at odds with basic assumptions underlying conservation biology. In any case, the prospects of using the Foucauldian approach for conservation purposes are deeply undermined. However, the Foucauldian reasoning contains some ideas that can be important and useful for conservation purposes, if they are duly clarified.

Societal extinction of species.

The ongoing global biodiversity crisis not only involves biological extinctions, but also the loss of experience and the gradual fading of cultural knowledge and collective memory of species. We refer to this phenomenon as 'societal extinction of species' and apply it to both extinct and extant taxa. We describe the underlying concepts as well as the mechanisms and factors that affect this process, discuss its main implications, and identify mitigation measures. Societal extinction is cognitively intractable, but it is tied to biological extinction and thus has important consequences for conservation policy and management. It affects societal perceptions of the severity of anthropogenic impacts and of true extinction rates, erodes societal support for conservation efforts, and causes the loss of cultural heritage.

What is Policy Analytics? An Exploration of 5 Years of Environmental Management Applications.

Our digital age is characterized by both a generalized access to data and an increased call for participation of the public and other stakeholders and communities in policy design and decision-making. This context raises new challenges for political decision-makers and analysts in providing these actors with new means and moral duties for decision support, including in the area of environmental policy. The concept of "policy analytics" was introduced in 2013 as an attempt to develop a framework, tools, and methods to address these challenges. This conceptual initiative prompted numerous research teams to develop empirical applications of this framework and to reflect on their own decision-support practice at the science-policy interface in various environmental domains around the world. During a workshop in Paris in 2018, participants shared and discussed their experiences of these applications and practices. In this paper, we present and analyze a set of applications to identify a series of key properties that underpin a policy analytics approach, in order to provide the conceptual foundation for policy analytics to address current policy design and decision-making challenges. The induced properties are demand-orientedness, performativity, normative transparency, and data meaningfulness. We show how these properties materialized through these six case studies, and we explain why we consider them key to effective policy analytics applications, particularly in environmental policy design and decision-making on environmental issues. This clarification of the policy analytics concept eventually enables us to highlight research frontiers to further improve the concept.

Adapting participatory processes to fine-tune conservation approaches in multiactor decision settings.

Conservation decisions are typically made in complex, dynamic, and uncertain settings, where multiple actors raise diverse and potentially conflicting claims, champion different and sometimes contradictory values, and enjoy varying degrees of freedom and power to act and influence collective decisions. Therefore, effective conservation actions require conservation scientists and practitioners to take into account the complexity of multiactor settings. We devised a framework to help conservation biologists and practitioners in this task. Institutional economic theories, which are insufficiently cited in the conservation literature, contain useful insights for conservation. Among these theories, the economies of worth can significantly contribute to conservation because it can be used to classify the types of values peoples or groups refer to when they interact during the elaboration and implementation of conservation projects. Refining this approach, we designed a framework to help conservation professionals grasp the relevant differences among settings in which decisions related to conservation actions are to be made, so that they can adapt their approaches to the features of the settings they encounter. This framework distinguishes 6 types of agreements and disagreements that can occur between actors involved in a conservation project (harmony, stricto sensu arrangement, deliberated arrangement, unilateral and reciprocal compromise, and locked-in), depending on whether they disagree on values or on their applications and on whether they can converge toward common values by working together. We identified key questions that conservationists should answer to adapt their strategy to the disagreements they encounter and identified relevant participatory processes to complete the adaptation.

Adaptación de los Procesos Participativos para Ajustar las Estrategias de Conservación en Entornos con Decisiones de Actores Múltiples Resumen Típicamente, las decisiones de conservación se toman en entornos complejos, dinámicos e inciertos. En estos entornos, los diferentes actores presentan alegaciones diversas y potencialmente conflictivas, defienden valores diferentes y a veces contradictorios y gozan de grados variantes de libertad y poder para actuar e influir sobre las decisiones colectivas. Por lo tanto, las acciones efectivas de conservación requieren que los científicos y practicantes de la conservación consideren la complejidad de los entornos con actores múltiples. Diseñamos un marco de trabajo para ayudar a los biólogos de la conservación y a los practicantes de la conservación con esta tarea. Las teorías de la economía institucional, las cuales están citadas de manera insuficiente en la literatura de la conservación, contienen conocimientos útiles para la conservación. Entre estas teorías, las de economía del valor pueden contribuir significativamente a la conservación porque pueden usarse para clasificar los tipos de valores, personas o grupos a los que se refieren cuando interactúan durante la elaboración e implementación de los proyectos de conservación. Con el refinado de esta estrategia diseñamos un marco de trabajo para ayudar a los profesionales de la conservación a entender las diferencias relevantes entre los entornos en los cuales se deben tomar decisiones relacionadas con las acciones de conservación, de tal manera que puedan adaptar sus estrategias a los rasgos de los entornos con los que se encuentren. Este marco de trabajo distingue seis tipos de acuerdos y desacuerdos que pueden ocurrir entre los actores involucrados en un proyecto de conservación (harmonía, acuerdo stricto sensu, acuerdo deliberado, compromiso unilateral y recíproco, y bloqueado), dependiendo de si hay discrepancias en torno a los valores o sus aplicaciones y si pueden converger hacia valores comunes mediante el trabajo conjunto. Identificamos preguntas clave que los conservacionistas deberían responder para adaptar su estrategia a los desacuerdos que encuentren e identificamos procesos relevantes de participación para completar esta adaptación.

Invasion costs, impacts, and human agency: response to Sagoff 2020.

Article impact statement: In an era of profound biodiversity crisis, invasion costs, invader impacts, and human agency should not be dismissed.

Societal attention toward extinction threats: a comparison between climate change and biological invasions.

Public attention and interest in the fate of endangered species is a crucial prerequisite for effective conservation programs. Societal awareness and values will largely determine whether conservation initiatives receive necessary support and lead to adequate policy change. Using text data mining, we assessed general public attention in France, Germany and the United Kingdom toward climate change and biological invasions in relation to endangered amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal species. Our analysis revealed that public attention patterns differed among species groups and countries but was globally higher for climate change than for biological invasions. Both threats received better recognition in threatened than in non-threatened species, as well as in native species than in species from other countries and regions. We conclude that more efficient communication regarding the threat from biological invasions should be developed, and that conservation practitioners should take advantage of the existing attention toward climate change.

On the overlap between scientific and societal taxonomic attentions - Insights for conservation.

Attention directed at different species by society and science is particularly relevant within the field of conservation, as societal preferences will strongly impact support for conservation initiatives and their success. Here, we assess the association between societal and research interests in four charismatic and threatened species groups, derived from a range of different online sources and social media platforms as well as scientific publications. We found a high level of concordance between scientific and societal taxonomic attention, which was consistent among assessed species groups and media sources. Results indicate that research is apparently not as disconnected from the interests of society as it is often reproached, and that societal support for current research objectives should be adequate. While the high degree of similarity between scientific and societal interest is both striking and satisfying, the dissimilarities are also interesting, as new scientific findings may constitute a constant source of novel interest for the society. In that respect, additional efforts will be necessary to draw scientific and societal focus towards less charismatic species that are in urgent need of research and conservation attention.

A meta-decision-analysis approach to structure operational and legitimate environmental policies - With an application to wetland prioritization.

Environmental policies are implemented in complex socio-economic settings, where numerous stakeholders hold different and potentially conflicting values. In addition to being scientifically well-founded, the experts' recommendations on which these policies are based therefore also need to be operational and legitimate. Multi-criteria decision-analysis (MCDA) is often used to solve management problems, but studies in the literature rarely place importance on the way stakeholders perceive researchers' interventions (which implies a lack of legitimacy), and most managers lack the skills to reproduce routinely the operations involved (which implies a lack of operationality). We use MCDA methodology in a different approach: "meta-decision-analysis" (Meta-DA). As researchers, instead of striving to identify the best way for us to solve managers' problems, we identify the actors (the decision-aid providers, DAPs) who are best placed to help managers, and we provide DAPs with the necessary tools. Implementing this approach involves three tasks: T1-identifying a legitimate DAP who will provide decision-aid to managers in routine policy implementations; T2- identifying, among the decisions involved in solving managers' problems, those for which managers and the stakeholders concerned consider that some actors have particular legitimacy; T3-designing tools that are compatible with both the DAP's skills and legitimacy constraints. We applied this approach, structured around T1-3, to wetland prioritization in a French administrative region (Bourgogne-Franche-Comté). This application illustrates the feasibility and usefulness of our approach. Our approach entails recommendations for various kinds of actors involved in environmental policies: For researchers, it provides a research agenda to develop new applications of MCDA. For managers and potential DAPs, it suggests that, for some of the problems they face collectively, they should seek the help of researchers to implement a Meta-DA approach. For policy-makers, it suggests that, by encouraging Meta-DA, for example through dedicated funding schemes, they could improve the effectiveness of environmental policies.

The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals.

A widespread opinion is that conservation efforts disproportionately benefit charismatic species. However, this doesn't mean that they are not threatened, and which species are "charismatic" remains unclear. Here, we identify the 10 most charismatic animals and show that they are at high risk of imminent extinction in the wild. We also find that the public ignores these animals' predicament and we suggest it could be due to the observed biased perception of their abundance, based more on their profusion in our culture than on their natural populations. We hypothesize that this biased perception impairs conservation efforts because people are unaware that the animals they cherish face imminent extinction and do not perceive their urgent need for conservation. By freely using the image of rare and threatened species in their product marketing, many companies may participate in creating this biased perception, with unintended detrimental effects on conservation efforts, which should be compensated by channeling part of the associated profits to conservation. According to our hypothesis, this biased perception would be likely to last as long as the massive cultural and commercial presence of charismatic species is not accompanied by adequate information campaigns about the imminent threats they face.

Experiencing biodiversity as a bridge over the science-society communication gap.

Drawing on the idea that biodiversity is simply the diversity of living things, and that everyone knows what diversity and living things mean, most conservation professionals eschew the need to explain the many complex ways in which biodiversity is understood in science. On many biodiversity-related issues, this lack of clarity leads to a communication gap between science and the general public, including decision makers who must design and implement biodiversity policies. Closing this communication gap is pivotal to the ability of science to inform sound environmental decision making. To address this communication gap, we propose a surrogate of biodiversity for communication purposes that captures the scientific definition of biodiversity yet can be understood by nonscientists; that is, biodiversity as a learning experience. The prerequisites of this or any other biodiversity communication surrogate are that it should have transdisciplinary relevance; not be measurable; be accessible to a wide audience; be usable to translate biodiversity issues; and understandably encompass biodiversity concepts. Biodiversity as a learning experience satisfies these prerequisites and is philosophically robust. More importantly, it can effectively contribute to closing the communication gap between biodiversity science and society at large.

Rarity value and species extinction: the anthropogenic Allee effect.

Standard economic theory predicts that exploitation alone is unlikely to result in species extinction because of the escalating costs of finding the last individuals of a declining species. We argue that the human predisposition to place exaggerated value on rarity fuels disproportionate exploitation of rare species, rendering them even rarer and thus more desirable, ultimately leading them into an extinction vortex. Here we present a simple mathematical model and various empirical examples to show how the value attributed to rarity in some human activities could precipitate the extinction of rare species-a concept that we term the anthropogenic Allee effect. The alarming finding that human perception of rarity can precipitate species extinction has serious implications for the conservation of species that are rare or that may become so, be they charismatic and emblematic or simply likely to become fashionable for certain activities.