Biodiversity Policy

The major question here is how it is that biodiversity policy is informed by science and knowledge. I have the hypothesis that at different levels (multinational, national, regional and local) the entire decision process  changes, since the priorities, actors and methods also change.

I would like to understand how these levels interact, and whether some of them are dominant over others. For instance, so called "indigenous knowledge" (the systems of concepts used by traditional communities to organize their knowledge about the world) is often very local in nature. What role it has in the governance of biodiversity at non-local levels? What relationships are established among indigenous knowledges and western science? Below there is a graph showing the amount of registered indigenous knowledge in Mexico, immediately before the conquest, and after.

Image above: A graph shows the number of species of plants and animals of Mexico, as per Aztec codices, colonial publications, or modern databases. The two surviving codices of the Spanish conquest contain hundreds or thousands of species of plants. The colonial text contains references to thousands of plant species. Modern databases show a steady increase in the number of species collected, beginning from a few dozens in the XVIII century, to tens of thousands today.