History and Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

The recent implementation of the IPBES is a major cornerstone in the transformation of the international environmental governance in the early 21st century. Often presented as “the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for biodiversity,” the IPBES aims to produce regular expert assessments of the state and evolution of biodiversity and ecosystems at the local, regional, and global levels. Its creation was promoted in the 1990s by biodiversity scientists and NGOs who increasingly came to view the failure of achieving effective conservation of nature as the consequence of the gap between science and policy, rather than of a lack of knowledge. The new institution embodies an approach to nature and nature conservation that results from the progressive evolution of international environmental governance, marked by the notion of ecosystem services (i.e., the idea that nature provides benefits to people and that nature conservation and human development should be thought of as mutually constitutive). The IPBES creation was entrusted to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Social environmental studies accounted for the genesis and organization of the IPBES and paid special attention to the strong emphasis put by IPBES participants on principles of openness and inclusivity and on the need to consider scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge (e.g. traditional ecological knowledge) on an equal footing. Overall the IPBES can be considered an innovative platform characterized by organizations and practices that foster inclusiveness and openness both to academic science and indigenous knowledge as well as to diverse values and visions of nature and its relationship to society. However, the extent to which it succeeded in putting different biodiversity values and knowledge on an equal footing in practice has varied and remains diversely appreciated by the literature.