Reframing from academic to pragmatic

From the point of view of a practitioner with decades of experience at the intersection of business and biodiversity, I want to advocate strongly to reframe some this scoping from the academic to the pragmatic. The theoretical frameworks promoted by scientists and scholars are robust and correct but mostly out of reach for all but the largest companies. BP, Kering and the other usual suspects can resource complex methodologies. These are the leaders as identified in Matt Jones’ talk on Thursday. But applying this approach to the vast “middle” will cause a negative reactive shift not the positive shift necessary to move from sticks and carrots to true system change.

The criteria and indicators should be tested against the reality of the business landscape and then made fit for purpose in a scientific frame but the opposite approach is the one more commonly taken. At the Wildlife Habitat Council, we have been commissioned again and again by companies seeking to translate academic criteria and indicators into workable BMPs and processes.

If the goal is to work such indicators and criteria into other aspects of sustainability, the effort needs to start at the core drivers for corporate sustainability and recognize that not every sector or even not every company within a specific sector has the same drivers. A backward mapping exercise from corporate reality to biodiversity indicators is much more likely to be successful than the traditional approach that has been presented, the same approach that has been used in the current plethora of frameworks that have seen uptake from none but the most highly resourced and driven organizations.

It is essential that monitoring and reporting be flexible, scalable and specific to conservation, operational and locational contexts. If this effort is truly seeking to move the middle, it needs to understand that a company is not singular unit with a singular purpose but is in fact a collection of units that operate and measure in vastly different ways.

The view point of the pragmatic practitioner with experience beyond the usual collection of companies has been absent from the creation of many of the largely academic approaches to business and biodiversity and it shows.