In a world of competing strategic demands, why should business leaders develop strategies focused on biodiversity? First, businesses rely on ecosystems to produce and reproduce the variety of life that enables economic and social systems. Second, biodiversity decline (or collapse) poses reputation risks to businesses, and business leaders must anticipate and mitigate the risk of being targeted by activists. Third, life on Earth has inherent value that managers should help preserve rather than destroy. Biodiversity mini-publics can help managers successfully engage on all three issues.

Biodiversity decline raises operational risks because ecosystems no longer meet business needs. To ensure stable operations, managers must understand which ecosystems their business relies on, how those ecosystems function, and how biodiversity affects ecosystem function. For example, agribusiness firms use biodiversity strategy to assess and manage risks from declining pollinator-insect biodiversity. Similarly, fashion firms like French luxury goods group Kering rely on plant and animal materials produced by ecosystems in their supply chains, and biodiversity decline directly threatens their core business operations.

Activist groups, governments, and other organizations increasingly connect business operations to biodiversity impacts in specific ecosystems and pressure businesses to reduce impacts by changing operations. It is reasonable to expect continued innovation in linking businesses to ecosystem impacts: more firms will be pressured to account for, reduce, or eliminate their biodiversity impacts.

Finally, the inherent value of life on Earth should be acknowledged and protected rather than destroyed by business activity. This could take the form of executives prohibiting their firms from harming or killing living organisms. Or it could take a weaker form: the business can harm and kill living organisms and ecosystems but cannot contribute to causing complete species extinction or habitat destruction.

Biodiversity Mini-Publics

Biodiversity mini-publics are a subset of a family of democratic innovations called “deliberative mini-publics” that are initiated to provide judgments about a particular topic. Before discussing biodiversity mini-publics, let’s look at mini-publics more broadly.

Initiators provide resources for a mini-public and play an important role in shaping decisions about its scope and focus. Mini-publics often include regulators, governments, nonprofits, and academics; they sometimes include businesses. Much of the actual design and execution of mini-publics is undertaken by conveners, who often have extensive training and experience with public deliberation. Both initiators and conveners often receive support from advisory committees.

What differentiates mini-publics from stakeholder panels or town halls is that they use a lottery system to select participants from a target population, as opposed to election or self-selection. Once selected and onboarded, participants learn about the issue at hand by consulting balanced briefing materials and participating in presentations by stakeholders and experts. With the aid of trained facilitators, they deliberate in a mix of small-group and plenary sessions. Small-group deliberations are usually private; many plenary sessions are made public.

After deliberating, participants issue their recommendations, usually via collective positions or individual survey responses. These are documented in a report that is disseminated to the initiating body and, usually, to the broader public.

Much of the excitement over mini-publics in recent years can be attributed to the unique qualities of the recommendations generated by participants. The lottery selection system brings together diverse groups that are more representative than committees that rely on self-selection or town hall forums that use elections to determine who will attend. Coupled with efforts to support learning and deliberation, these groups generate a richer, more comprehensive set of insights on the topic at hand.

Furthermore, mini-public participants can act in a relatively impartial and independent manner. They do not represent particular constituencies and are not subject to the dynamics of electoral politics, so they can focus on longer-term, more complex, more controversial issues and are well-placed to critically engage with and weigh expert knowledge when making decisions. 

Mini-publics have been initiated to help tackle a wide range of social and environmental issues around the world, including genetically modified food, public transportation, and homelessness. Recently, there has been an increase in climate-focused mini-publics, including Scotland’s Climate Assembly and Climate Assembly UK.

However, despite the importance of protecting biodiversity and restoring ecosystems to increase biodiversity, mini-publics have seldom been initiated to focus on that topic. There are two important exceptions. World Wide Views on Biodiversity was a pioneering effort to foster deliberation about biodiversity. Roughly 3,000 individuals from 25 countries participated in day-long forums in September 2012. Participants were selected through a mix of selection methods, including lotteries and targeted recruitment. They deliberated about a standardized set of topics and cast their votes on specific questions. The results of the votes were collated for comparative purposes. As an example, 85.71% of participants voted in support of a proposal asking, “Should users of genetic resources from the high seas pay a fee to global biodiversity for being allowed to use them?”

A more recent example is Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss, which was launched in 2022 and held its last meeting in January 2023. It brought together 99 participants (selected through a lottery) and one chair to provide recommendations on how the government can address biodiversity loss. As of this writing, the participants’ sector-by-sector recommendations are yet to be published. However, a November 2020 press release announced that the group had voted in favor of some significant recommendations, most notably a constitutional amendment that would put biodiversity safeguards in place.

[For more from the authors on this topic, see: “Leveraging Insights from Mini-Publics to Develop Biodiversity Strategies.”]