2025/11/19 by Jeremy T. Bruskotter, Neil Carter, Matthew Hamilton +1 · 1 voice
Environmental Science · #Environmental Conservation and Management #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance #Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
paper · doi:10.1111/cobi.70174
openalex publication_date 2025/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/11/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27
Rather than standards for coexistence, founded on notions of universality and uniformity and top-down governance through certification and assessment, coexistence may be best developed collaboratively by formulating shared visions and coexistence principles relevant to specific landscapes. …coexistence is a social contract between consenting individuals representing all the social groups comprising a larger community of humans and wildlife sharing a landscape. Adherents willingly coadapt and live so that wildlife can persist within agreed boundaries of what the land and its nonhuman inhabitants require to flourish, and within what is acceptable, agreed, and necessary for the human communities to persist and flourish. Though we find much to agree with in Pooley's essay, developing an adequate vision of coexistence likely requires attention to first-order principles that Pooley neglects. Pooley's vision emphasizes what some disciplinary scholars refer to as bottom-up governance and procedural justice, but critically neglects complementary principles, namely, top-down governance and outcome justice. Top-down governance occurs when public decisions are made by higher or more centralized authorities on behalf of broader constituencies. Bottom-up governance occurs when local actors are meaningfully included in decision-making and implementation. Representative democracies are routinely a mixture of top-down and bottom-up governance. For example, conservation of endangered species in the United States is governed by the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (Public Law 93-205) (ESA). The ESA allows, for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (i.e., an agency responsible for administering and enforcing that law) to use bottom-up processes that engage a wide range of stakeholders to help the agency guide certain aspects of conservation (Gosnell et al., 2018). The agency can also employ top-down modes of governance by basing decisions on, for example, technical expertise (e.g., decisions to classify species as “threatened” or “endangered”) or perceived political feasibility. Although these examples risk oversimplification, they sufficiently support 2 important points. First, the effectiveness of bottom-up governance for bringing about conservation outcomes should not be taken for granted (Koontz & Thomas, 2006). Though bottom-up governance can be especially useful for ensuring procedures are viewed as fair, fair procedures do not necessarily result in better conservation outcomes. Furthermore, bottom-up governance also has several well-understood drawbacks, including being time and cost-intensive (Irving & Stansbury, 2004), sensitive to power dynamics (Krester et al., 2018), and vulnerable to manipulation by managers of the process (López-Bao et al., 2017), who can put their finger on the scale when alternatives are weighed. Second, it is problematic to treat top-down and bottom-up governance as mutually exclusive—as hinted at by the aforementioned example of ESA-related decisions. Most real-world governance is usefully viewed as being on a spectrum from largely top-down to largely bottom-up. Bottom-up elements could include, for example, allowing local people to propose the least imposing means of meeting a policy objective, and top-down elements could include the enforcement of regulations or distribution of resources for policy implementation (Cash et al., 2006; Koontz & Newig, 2014). The latter requires establishing the very sorts of rules Pooley resists. The mixture of top-down and bottom-up elements is often indicated by interactions between governmental actors, representing centralized, top-down elements, and nongovernmental actors representing more localized, bottom-up interests (Lubell, 2013; Morrison et al., 2019; Ostrom, 2010). In particular, polycentric governance—the distribution of power across multiple centers of authority—often involves the integration of top-down and bottom-up elements (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2012). However, even though polycentric governance involves a broader suite of stakeholders relative to hierarchical systems dominated by governmental actors, polycentricity does not preclude the use or value of top-down command-and-control structures (Berardo & Lubell, 2019). In fact, such structures can function to support bottom-up processes. For example, the aforementioned trends in the administration of the ESA encourage collaborative decision-making among stakeholders representing local and centralized interests. This encouragement includes, for example, the prospect of local stakeholders finding effective conservation solutions that require the least onerous restrictions on the use of private land. At the same time, other stakeholders representing centralized interests have the option of responding to unfair collaboration through litigation (Fischman et al., 2021). Coexistence with biodiversity is usefully analyzed, not only through the lens of top-down and bottom-up governance, but also through the lens of ideas developed by justice theorists, especially the concepts of procedural justice and outcome justice. Procedural justice is said to have been realized if a decision is made according to a fair procedure. In contrast, outcome justice is less about the procedures employed and more about whether the outcome is fair. Pooley's vision of coexistence appears overly focused on procedural justice at the expense of outcome justice. But justice theory and the intuitions of many nonexperts indicate that both forms of justice are vitally important (Hauenstein et al., 2001). Developing a vision of coexistence can be further informed by theories of distributive justice, which Pooley does not mention. Distributive justice is usefully understood as a wise application of four virtues—equality, equity, need, and entitlement—to resolve conflicts about the distribution of limited resources (Hülle et al., 2018). A key distinction between conventional theories of distributive justice and coexistence is the need to decide how to treat nonhuman agents. If the direct moral standing of nonhuman entities is not acknowledged, then distributive justice and coexistence may be much alike in the sense that conflicts are resolved by considering how the human agents of a conflict are affected by various possible allocations and uses of a valued resource. If, however, the direct moral standing of nonhuman entities is acknowledged, then it will be important to understand which nonhuman entities possess intrinsic value, what obligations intrinsic value creates, and the extent to which conventional principles of distributive justice apply to cases involving human and nonhuman entities. Scholarship on this topic is still in its infancy (e.g., Vucetich et al., 2015, 2018; Washington et al. 2018, Treves et al., 2019). Another lesson from the scholarship on justice of vital importance for understanding coexistence is that distributive justice is often about the fair allocation of losses. This contrasts with what may be an overly optimistic expectation that collaborative governance tends to lead to “win-win outcomes” (e.g., Redpath et al., 2013, p. 103). In other words, coexistence might be as much or more about discovering the sacrifices all parties need to make than it is about discovering how everyone can get everything they want. Coexistence may also concern discovering how to realize high levels of subjective well-being in cases where objective well-being is diminished. This topic is also in its infancy and will likely require deep synthesis of psychological and justice theories (Constnaza et al., 2007). One might naturally wonder, in practical terms, how coexistence with biodiversity should be operationalized to provide a good balance of procedural and outcome justice? Herein lies a key challenge: this question cannot readily or reliably be answered without first conceptualizing coexistence in terms of what environmental outcomes ought to be realized and what is the fairest (or adequately fair) way to treat those affected by coexistence. An adequate conceptualization of coexistence also requires principles for resolving what we expect to be a common case of not being able to realize an appropriate environmental outcome without also infringing on the expressed interest of some stakeholders. If the principle for resolving that conflict is, for example, to generally accept the best environmental outcome that can be obtained without infringing on the interests of any stakeholder, then that conceptualization of coexistence is likely to be too neglectful of outcome justice. Tips for operationalization necessarily come after the difficult work of better conceptualizing coexistence. An important point is that—by our judgment—the community of conservation professionals have not sufficiently resolved what constitutes an adequate conceptualization of coexistence with biodiversity. One might also naturally wonder are there specific cases to cite in which a balance of procedural and outcome justice has led to more effective conservation efforts? The answer to this question depends on how effective conservation is defined. As such, the answer does not come from examples of specific cases. Rather, the answer is found in more carefully attending to the definition of effective conservation. If it is defined by some particular environmental outcome, then procedural justice is not necessarily needed. If effective conservation is defined only by satisfying a certain set of stakeholders’ perceptions of procedural justice, then effective conservation may not require any other particular outcome. However, if effective conservation is defined as arriving at a particular environmental outcome in a procedurally fair manner, then conservation demands adequate attention to both procedural and outcome justice. Although some intriguing analyses of conservation cases from around the globe attend to procedures and outcomes (e.g., Brooks et al., 2012), these efforts are isolated and more are needed. For example, analyses still need to be performed at larger spatial scales, and more attention needs to be given to the normative dimension of the quantifying procedure and outcome. We commend Pooley for beginning a conversation about how to operationalize coexistence in practice and his desire to be inclusive (see also Bruskotter et al., 2022). However, operationalizing before adequately understanding what it means to coexist with biodiversity—in principle—risks harm from pursuing a misidentified target. An adequate understanding of coexistence requires more careful attention to the strengths and weaknesses of top-down and bottom-up governance. No less important is how procedural justice and outcome justice ought to be manifest in the meaning of coexistence. That manifestation depends critically on understanding the types of obligations humans have to the nonhuman world, as well as to other humans (Vucetich et al., 2018). We could not resolve or even adequately dissect these issues here, in part, because they are broad subjects of centuries-old academic disciplines. Rather, our goal was to highlight concepts that are essential to, but underattended in, conversations about what it means to coexist with biodiversity. This article benefitted from the assistance of two thoughtful reviewers.