Resource description:
Introduction
Biodiversity transitions require fundamental changes across multiple sectors that interact with nature. In this brief, we focus on agriculture, forestry, and health as illustrative sectors with strong and distinct links to biodiversity, reflecting a broader nexus perspective (see also BIONEXT Policy Brief 3). The changes required in these sectors reshape how costs, benefits, and responsibilities are distributed among societal actors — meaning that they inevitably raise questions of fairness. Yet biodiversity-relevant policies rarely treat justice (Box 1) as an explicit objective. Instead, they tend to focus on feasibility and social acceptance. As a result, justice remains present but largely implicit — and therefore not actively governed.
What do we mean by ‘justice’?
In this brief, justice refers to how biodiversity policies ensure fair outcomes for people and nature. It includes:
- Distributive justice: how costs and benefits are distributed among actors
- Recognition justice: whose roles, knowledge, and needs are acknowledged
- Procedural justice: who participates in decision-making and how
These dimensions are shaped by differences across time (past-future), scale (local-global), and actor’s capacities and resources, and may also extend to non-human actors. Injustice arises when policies systematically benefit some actors while disadvantaging others or excluding certain perspectives. Justice is not fixed: it takes shape through policy design and implementation and differs across contexts.
Box 1: Definition of justice
Drawing on cases from the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium (Box 2-4), this brief shows how justice is experienced by stakeholders in the context of different sectoral policies. The brief identifies recurring patterns across sectors and highlights why failing to explicitly address justice risks reinforcing inequalities and limiting transformative change.
Netherlands — Nature-inclusive agriculture
A densely populated agricultural system facing nitrogen, climate and water quality crises. Governance is shaped by consensus-driven traditions, with strong emphasis on economic viability and innovation. Justice concerns centre on the unequal position of small farmers, but policies primarily aim to maintain sector stability rather than redistribute resources or power.
Finland — Continuous cover forestry
A forestry sector historically dominated by clear-cutting practices, shaped by the forest industry needs and policy support. Emerging biodiversity, climate and water concerns have opened space for alternative management practices. The status quo is reinforced by economic policy instruments favouring intensive forest management practices.
Boxes 2-4: Case studies
Belgium — Nature-based health initiatives
An emerging field viewing interactions with nature as health intervention. While widely seen as beneficial, unequal availability and quality of green space and risks of commodifying nature raise important justice questions that are partly recognised in policy but insufficiently implemented in practice.
Justice in biodiversity-relevant policy: key gaps and implications
Across biodiversity-relevant policies related to the selected cases, justice is rarely addressed explicitly, despite its central role in shaping outcomes. This includes EU-level instruments and their implementation through complex and often fragmented national policy mixes. Across sectors, this leads to recurring gaps in how costs, benefits, and responsibilities are allocated. Five patterns stand out.
Justice remains implicit
In biodiversity-relevant policies at EU and national levels, justice is rarely defined as an explicit objective. Instead, it is addressed indirectly through feasibility, participation, and economic viability. In practice, this means underlying injustices often remain obscured, while responses focus on compensation rather than addressing root causes or redistributing costs and responsibilities. Interviewees pointed to structural issues that remain unaddressed, including the prioritisation of dominant economic actors and the persistence of inequalities affecting specific communities. Without explicit definition, justice cannot be steered or governed in a consistent and transparent way, which in practice reinforces incremental, consensus-driven approaches and constrains more transformative options.
Participation is used to secure acceptance, but may not shape outcomes
Participation is widely used, but primarily to secure acceptance rather than influence outcomes. In the Netherlands, consensus-oriented processes tend to produce lowest-common-denominator solutions. In Finland, participatory forest management processes have often remained token, not genuinely redistributed decision-making power. In Belgium, reliance on grassroots initiatives can exclude less visible or less resourced actors. As a result, participation often does not address underlying power imbalances. Securing acceptance supports implementation but does not ensure fair distribution of costs and benefits.
Policies prioritise users over stewards
Policies primarily frame actors as users or producers, rather than as stewards of ecosystems. Farmers and forest owners are positioned as economic actors, while environmental objectives are treated instrumentally. While in Belgium, citizens are framed mainly as beneficiaries of nature-based health initiatives. Moreover, across cases, nature itself is not treated as a subject of justice. This limits support for existing stewardship practices and reduces incentives for long-term ecological care. It also tends to favour large, capital-intensive actors over smaller or alternative practices.
Governance avoids conflict, limiting transformation
Current governance approaches are not designed to handle the conflicts and trade-offs inherent to transitions to more nature positive practices. Policies often rely on voluntary, flexible, and low-conflict instruments to maintain stability and secure participation. However, biodiversity transitions inevitably involve redistribution and competing interests. Avoiding conflict does not prevent it — it shifts it elsewhere and delays necessary decisions. This reduces the capacity of policy to adapt and respond to emerging justice claims.
Sectoral-knowledge is prioritised over nature-related knowledge
Policy processes often prioritise knowledge aligned with dominant sectoral interests, from experts typically drawn from within those sectors, while other forms of expertise remain underrepresented. This creates gaps in how ecological impacts and justice considerations are understood and addressed. Across cases, interviewees noted that sector-specific expertise tends to carry more weight than ecological or social science knowledge. As a result, definitions of nature-inclusive practices are shaped by sectoral priorities, limiting the integration of diverse knowledge systems in policy making.
What this means for policy
When justice remains implicit, sectoral policies risk underperforming not only in terms of fairness, but also long-term effectiveness and impact. This creates several systemic consequences:
Persistent inequalities: Unaddressed differences in capacity, responsibility, and access mean that policy measures distribute costs and benefits unevenly, reducing both effectiveness and perceived fairness.
Unresolved conflicts: Reliance on voluntary or narrow forms of participation prioritises uptake over alignment of interests, leaving underlying tensions unaddressed and, in some cases, shifting them to resistance or non-cooperation.
Underused and overlooked leverage points: Policies fail to mobilise existing capacities for effective implementation because they overlook diverse knowledge systems, stewardship practices and less dominant actors, including nature itself.
As a result, policies may achieve short-term feasibility but fall short on long-term effectiveness and legitimacy. To deliver durable, nature-positive outcomes, justice must be treated as a core governance dimension — explicitly addressed, regularly assessed, and adapted over time.
Policy Recommendations
Make justice an explicit policy objective
Define clear justice criteria for each transition context
Link biodiversity-relevant policy targets and monitoring to measurable social and distributional outcomes
Integrate justice considerations throughout policy design, implementation, and evaluation
Strengthen participation by addressing power and responsibility
Require explicit assessment of cost and benefit distribution across actor groups
Enhance participatory processes by focussing on negotiating trade-offs and allocating responsibilities
Move beyond consultation by introducing co-decision mechanisms, such as shared governance bodies or stakeholder representation with decision-making authority
Recognise and support nature stewardship roles
Integrate nature and nature stewardship roles into policy frameworks, funding schemes, and indicators
Target support toward actors already implementing ecosystem stewardship practices
Remove regulatory and administrative barriers for small-scale and transitioning actors
Design governance to handle conflict and adaptation
Establish formal mechanisms to manage conflict and negotiate competing claims
Enable iterative policy design through monitoring, evaluation, and revision cycles
Track fairness impacts alongside ecological outcomes over time, using clear indicators and reporting processes
Recognise, strengthen and build on nature-related knowledge
Integrate ecological and nature-related knowledge more systemically into sectoral policymaking (e.g. agriculture, forestry, health)
Broaden definitions of expertise to include ecological, social, and locally grounded knowledge - including indigenous, local and practitioner perspectives
Strengthen mechanisms for translating such knowledge into decision-making and implementation
Conclusion
Addressing biodiversity challenges requires fundamental changes in how sectors such as agriculture, forestry, and health interact with nature. Treating these changes as questions of feasibility or management overlooks how they redistribute costs, benefits, and responsibilities not only among the actors who experience adverse effects, but also actors such as future generations who depend on these fundamental changes.
Making justice explicit is not an optional add-on, but essential for developing policies that are effective, legitimate, and sustainable over time. It supports long-term sectoral performance, helps to address conflicts and ensures that nature-positive outcomes are both achievable and grounded in equity, legitimacy, and meaningful inclusion – not merely social acceptance.
The project: BIONEXT is a research and innovation project that joins the fight for nature and biodiversity. The project produces new evidence to better understand biodiversity loss and demonstrates how biodiversity underpins every aspect of life; the water we drink, the food we eat, and our health. To secure and protect these values, the project demands transformative change: BIONEXT’s goal is a sustainable society, where links between biodiversity, water, food, energy, transport, climate, and health are acknowledged and nature and biodiversity are a part of everyday choices and policymaking.
Project coordinator: Finnish Environment Institute (Syke), (Finland)
Project partners: Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), (Netherlands); Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CzechGlobe), (Czech Republic); Athina-erevnitko kentro kainotomias stis technologies tis pliroforias, ton epikoinonion kai tis gnosis (ATHENA), (Greece); Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), (Germany); Oppla, (Netherlands); Foundation for Applied Information Technology in Environment, Agriculture and Global Changes (TIAMASG), (Romania); the University of Antwerp, (Belgium); The UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), (United Kingdom); UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), (United Kingdom)
Author/Contact:
Hebinck, A. 1), Fransen, T. 1), D’Amato, D. 2), Piipponen-Doyle, S. 3), Ronkainen, J.P. 2), Saarikoski, H. 2) (2026)
1) Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands
2) Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki, Finland
3) United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), Cambridge, United Kingdom
Publisher: Finnish Environment Institute (Syke)