Governance in UNESCO Biosphere Reserves Project Activities

There is some evidence from across the World Network of biosphere reserves that some biosphere reserves have highly innovative and participatory governance systems. Yet the capturing of these ‘governance innovations’ is limited, resulting in poor opportunities for sharing these learnings with other biosphere reserves globally. Drawing from the published literature, this project activity aims to establish and document the governance opportunities and challenges individual biosphere reserves have faced.

There is limited readily available evidence available on governance models implemented by various biosphere reserves globally, the unique adaptations biosphere reserves have made to their governance models to improve implementation in their specific landscape contexts, and the motivations behind these adaptations.

However a recent review Kratzer (2018) has shown a steady increase in scientific publications related to BRs published between 1970 and 2016, with the majority of this increase happening since mid-2000’s. Since 2005 to 2016, annual scientific output on ‘biosphere reserve’ related literature increased 5-fold, from 62 to 299, and more than half of these published in the period 2010–2016. This steady growth in research citing ‘biosphere reserves’ suggests an opportunity for our research on BR governance – presenting an as yet, untapped resource library that we can mine for BR governance-related content.

Using bibliometric indexing platforms Scopus and Web of Science, we used specific keywords as the basis for the literature search. These keywords were based on our long-standing experience in the BR arena, as well as from our own extensive literature library. Criteria for the search terms included:

• Specific to biosphere reserves listed by UNESCO in accordance with the MAB Programme;
• Related to governance models as implemented in biosphere reserves, which include references to management mechanisms or management entities;
• Articles in the English language.

The final keywords used for the literature search in Scopus were: (UNESCO AND biosphere) AND (governance). This was further refined by (management).  From this a total of 114 papers (July 2022 search deadline) were identified for coding for our review purposes, with only 62 of these considered relevant (i.e, detailed governance of a specific BR, governance of a collection of BRs at national/regional level, or governance of BR components). These articles were read in full, and coded according to paper and BR demographics, MAB sub-networks, methodology, actors involved in BR entity, actors involved in decision-making processes, nature of the governance arrangements and legal status, challenges and benefits of the chosen governance approach as determined by social, economic, political, institutional and environmental factors.

The paper is currently in preparation.