EIA-driven biodiversity mainstreaming in development cooperation: Confronting expectations and practice in the DR Congo
Introduction
Biodiversity is facing a crisis at the global and local level. All dimensions of biodiversity are under –anthropogenic – pressure (Steffen et al., 2015). This situation threatens human wellbeing in direct and indirect ways as human systems and -biodiversity-based- natural systems are closely intertwined (Martin-Lopez and Montes, 2015). Sustaining and preserving ‘nature’s contributions to people’ is now considered a key priority, as biodiversity loss alters the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide people with goods and services (Diaz et al., 2018; Cardinale et al., 2012). This is especially the case in Africa, where a substantial part of the population relies directly upon functioning ecosystems for the provision of a steady flow of essential goods and services (IPBES, 2018). This is recognized by both conservation and development professionals, whose shared views on the positive linkages between conservation and development objectives present an opportunity for concerted action (Biggs et al., 2018; Roe et al., 2013).
Despite this realization, biodiversity metrics indicate a continuing decline of biodiversity and many ecosystem services across Africa (Costanza et al., 2014; IPBES, 2018). Food and raw materials coupled with agriculture are key ecosystem services in the forested parts of western and Central Africa, while tourism, water and grazing are prevalent in the (semi-)arid South and South-West (Egoh et al., 2012). However, area-specific in-depth studies on ecosystem services are still too rare, especially and paradoxically in some global biodiversity hotspots (Pires et al., 2018), reflecting an enduring research bias (Di Marco et al., 2017).
Development cooperation is defined as the range of international efforts aimed at supporting development, which is not driven by profit, discriminates in favour of developing countries. It is based on cooperative relationships that seek to enhance developing country ownership and aims to raise human wellbeing (UN ECOSOC, 2015). Development cooperation has, as a rule, been organized as a sector-based effort. Indeed, cooperation efforts are typically directed specifically at agriculture, or at health, or at education etc. Yet all development is linked to and/or impacts biodiversity, whether directly or indirectly (Drutschinin et al., 2015; Kok et al., 2008; Suich et al., 2015). This by no means implies that the efforts to improve human wellbeing and to conserve biodiversity necessarily lead to win-win solutions. However the increasing acknowledgement of biodiversity-development linkages, which were highlighted most recently by the ongoing work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (Diaz et al., 2015; IPBES, 2018), has led to the recognition that biodiversity conservation should be an integral part of effective development cooperation. International policy forums are calling for joint action for biodiversity and development, e.g. in the 2010 Nagoya Declaration on Biodiversity in Development Cooperation and in the Global Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, which calls for biodiversity integration into development strategies (CBD, 2010).
Efforts to integrate biodiversity as a new issue in sectors that have not systematically addressed it so far, is referred to as ‘mainstreaming’. The motivation behind mainstreaming is rooted in the understanding that the causes of biodiversity loss lay within the remit of other policy domains or sectors (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al., 2017). Hence, these sectors need to address biodiversity issues in order to curb the negative biodiversity trends. Biodiversity conservation hence requires a whole-of-government approach (Adenle et al., 2015). Biodiversity mainstreaming in development cooperation is now an established stated policy goal of most multilateral (e.g. the OECD, the World Bank, the European Union) and bilateral (i.e. individual countries) providers (Drutschinin et al., 2015; Kok et al., 2008; Persson, 2009), and is supported by the international policy architecture of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
In practice mainstreaming encompasses a range of approaches, structured along the ‘entry points’. Entry points are situated at the national, sectoral, project and local level. Intervening at any of these entry points can be done in a variety of ways, ranging from spatial planning to environmental fiscal reform, awareness raising, capacity-building and impact assessment (Drutschinin et al., 2015; OECD, 2012; Vanhove et al., 2017).
Impact assessment, a process aiming at the identification of the future consequences of current or planned actions (IAIA, 2015), is promoted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 2018) as a means of integrating biodiversity in policies. In development cooperation, impact assessment mostly takes on the form of environmental impact assessment (EIA) at project level, and of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) at policy, plan or programme level. The application of impact assessment contributes to internalize the costs and benefits of the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity (Tallis et al., 2015). Impact assessment has been used to integrate cross-cutting development-relevant issues (among which biodiversity) in development cooperation since the 1980s (SIDA, 1998; OECD DAC, 1992). Although the philosophy and systematic approach of impact assessment has by now reached almost all countries, biodiversity is not necessarily adequately considered in impact assessments and in development cooperation in general (Verissimo et al., 2014; Hugé et al., 2017). Indeed, impact assessment (in its various forms) is no panacea to integrate biodiversity into development cooperation, as narrowly utilitarian framings of biodiversity tend to dominate it, and as biodiversity baseline data are seldom used to inform the mitigation of negative biodiversity impacts (Hugé et al., 2017). Yet impact assessment also allows to transparently identify win-win solutions when possible, and to assess trade-offs between development and conservation when necessary (McShane et al., 2011). Furthermore, impact assessment has been explicitly designed to support decision-making and is aligned, albeit imperfectly, to the iterative cycle of progressing insight that is supposed to underpin development cooperation initiatives.
In practice, biodiversity mainstreaming initiatives show varying degrees of success. Motivational, institutional and means-related (financial, capacity and time constraints) barriers often hamper effective mainstreaming (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al., 2018; Nkiaka and Lovett, 2018). Moreover, biodiversity faces competition from other cross-cutting development priorities. These issues, such as climate change adaptation, may have a higher political salience than biodiversity, although both are closely related (De Roeck et al., 2018). Reframing biodiversity concerns can lead to an increase in political prominence, hence the importance of persuasive narratives and framings in EIA processes and in their subsequent communication to a wider audience (Hugé et al., 2017; Rose et al., 2018). Van de Perre et al. (2018) have recently shown that simplistic assumptions such as generalized co-benefits between carbon storage and maximum biodiversity, are not always backed by evidence, demonstrating the need for targeted actions in favor of both biodiversity and climate adaptation and mitigation.
In order to gain insight in the motivations, challenges and strategies regarding the mainstreaming of biodiversity in development cooperation, this study focuses on recent biodiversity mainstreaming efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to the 2016 Human Development Report, the DRC is categorized as a country with low human development. With an HDI of 0.435 (and an inequality-adjusted HDI of 0.297), the DRC occupies the 176th place out of 188 countries and is one of the least developed countries in the world (UNDP, 2016). The three largest providers of bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) are the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Belgium (OECD DAC, 2016). The DRC harbours a unique biodiversity, that is severely threatened by logging, climate change, agricultural encroachment, poaching, infrastructural development, unregulated mining and conflict (Butsic et al., 2015). Yet it is still home to an immensely biodiverse range of ecosystems (Inogwabini, 2014). The Congo Basin, as the second largest forest basin in the world, is still less affected by deforestation than the Amazon Basin. It provides a living to around 60 million people in Central Africa and has a strong potential for job creation (CBFP, 2018). The DRC is the second most forested tropical country in the world (after Brazil) with 154 million hectares of forest (FAO, 2011), and holds the largest part of the Congo Basin Rainforest (60 % according to Verbeeck et al., 2011). Yet, the country loses 0.2 % of its forest cover every year (FAO, 2015). Since 1999, the DRC has a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), which is the principal instrument to implement the CBD at the national level. Coordinated national-level actions have been undertaken to achieve the CBD’s 2020 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, but most are not independently reviewed. At the local level though, many institutes (such as the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN)) and individuals have contributed to the realization of the Aichi targets. However, there has been a lack of cooperation between the Ministry of Environment & Sustainable Development with other ministries, stakeholders and local communities, and there is still no efficient national system to monitor and review biodiversity (CBD, 2018).
The general aims of this study are to gain a better understanding of: i. biodiversity mainstreaming in development cooperation in general; ii. biodiversity mainstreaming in a biodiversity-rich developing country such as the DRC. Hence, this study aims:
- •
To determine the current motivations, obstacles and effectiveness of biodiversity mainstreaming in the DRC; (objective 1)
- •
To assess the framing, the representation and use of biodiversity in a selection of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) recently conducted in the DRC; (objective 2)
The study uses a combination of i. key informant interviews, and ii. qualitative analysis of reports of EIA (environmental impact assessment) conducted in the DRC.
Section snippets
Outline of the methodology
We used two different methods. In order to explore the dynamics of biodiversity mainstreaming, we started with interviews, as this method allows to explore a topic through mutual learning between interviewee and interviewer. Interviews also allow the research team to identify issues that may not have been considered initially. Interviews allow to scope the topic of research (Young et al., 2018), and make it possible to probe respondents regarding suggested motivations and obstacles for
Motivations, obstacles, effectiveness and tools for biodiversity integration in development cooperation (interviews)
The results of the Likert scale questions are displayed in Table 2. The underlying motivations for biodiversity mainstreaming show that intrinsic reasons coexist with instrumental reasons. This indicates that the most effective way to convey a biodiversity conservation message varies depending on the target audience and context. The respondents agreed that ‘lack of capacity’ constituted an obstacle at the Belgian level, as well as the ‘lack of political will’ at various Congolese government
The Congolese context & the bigger picture
Given the international importance of the DRC biodiversity and ecosystems, and the breadth of its development challenges, assessing how biodiversity can be integrated in the country’s current and future development is a topical and urgent issue. The motivations underlying the integration of biodiversity in development cooperation in the DR Congo are diverse. Both the interview respondents as the analyzed EIAs tend to combine different narratives to call for biodiversity integration. The EIAs do
Conclusion
There is no panacea for biodiversity mainstreaming in development cooperation. Based on the interviews conducted in this study, the most effective approaches to mainstream biodiversity depend on the framings which underpin the preservation of biodiversity (framings that were shown to go beyond the merely utilitarian one in the DRC in our EIA-analysis); on the local governance context (incl. the involvement of diverse stakeholders; the collaboration between ministries, and the availability of
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank all interview respondents for sharing their views with us. This study was performed thanks to funding provided through the VLIR UOS Global Minds post-doctoral fellowship granted by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, by the FNRS-FRS SASES project, by the Policy-Supporting Research (PSR) projects of VLIR-UOS and ARES-CUD and by the Belgian Science Policy-funded EVAMAB project. We thank Lucie Ongena for her help in developing Fig. 1.
References (63)
- et al.
Global conservation and management of biodiversity in developing countries: an opportunity for a new approach
Environ. Sci. Policy
(2015) - et al.
Framing global biodiversity: IPBES between mother earth and ecosystem services
Environ. Sci. Policy
(2015) - et al.
Deforestation and timber production in Congo after implementation of sustainable forest management
Land Use Policy
(2016) - et al.
Conservation and conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the impacts of warfare, mining and protected areas on deforestation
Biol. Conserv.
(2015) - et al.
A Delphi-based approach to developing expert systems with the cooperation of multiple experts
Expert Syst. Appl.
(2008) - et al.
Changes in the global value of ecosystem services
Glob. Environ. Chang.
(2014) - et al.
Mainstreaming climate change adaptation into the European Union’s development assistance
Environ. Sci. Policy
(2018) - et al.
Changing trends and persisting biases in three decades of conservation science
Glob. Ecol. Conserv.
(2017) - et al.
Utilitarian framings of biodiversity shape environmental impact assessment in development cooperation
Environ. Sci. Policy
(2017) - et al.
Mainstreaming biodiversity in economic sectors: an analytical framework
Biol. Conserv.
(2017)