Introduction

The recent eminently successful plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (29th April–4th May 2019), had the attention of policy makers across the world. In all, 130 governments signed up to support and implement the IPBES findings. Global scientific evidence generated by IPBES is supplied to policy makers. Though the inclusion of policy stakeholders from nation states is ensured at the plenary meeting when the assessments are finalised, the production of ‘summary for policy makers’ and other material for nation states to act on, is an explicit statement of this knowledge supply (see IPBES 2019). This paper explores this knowledge-policy relationship. IPBES as an international expert organization with a specific mission (Borie et al. 2015; Obermeister 2018), expects knowledge generated by the assessment to be taken up and implemented through policies formulated and implemented by nation states. This paper asks whether a more plural and public debate centric knowledge-policy relationship may work to achieve the IPBES goals.

The global battle over biodiversity (Masood 2018) has now become a battle between knowledge actors. The schism, we are told is strongest among those who scientifically estimate the economic value of ecosystem services (mainly as monetary values) and those who see the intrinsic values in nature itself as well as the instrumental and relational values of nature’s contributions to humanity. Sir Robert Watson, leading the IPBES since 2012, is worried that policy makers will stop paying attention the moment they hear squabbling scientists (Masood 2018). This stems from his faith that ‘credible scientific information is essential for informed policy formulation and implementation’ (Watson 2012, pg. 3266).

The National Geographic begins its IPBES reportage stating that: THE BONDS THAT hold nature together may be at risk of unravelling from deforestation, overfishing, development, and other human activities…(Leahy 2019).

This paper points out that these bonds have unfortunately not been unravelled accidentally. The economic activities like overfishing, deforestation and development in general, are governed by policies that we created to suppress, control and use nature. These policies are part of the bonds or institutions, rules and norms that govern people-nature interactions today. Our concern is that they are often informed by scientific knowledge about nature, its multiple functions and services for us.

A specific expert panel or the creation of a committee for strengthening the science-policy relationship mark several GAs today (Borie et al. 2015). In their list of other global environmental assessments (GEAs) that have become the rage, Borie et al. (2015), mention the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the GEAs which set global expertise in the sciences as the mechanism to supply policy-relevant knowledge. They quote other GAs that emulate this mechanism like the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Antimicrobial Resistance. Few acknowledge the role that the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD 2009) with Sir Robert Watson as Chair, played in bringing several contentious knowledge-policy relationships and the messy knowledge politics of agriculture in the environment to the forefront (see Feldman et al. 2010).

The paper argues that the ‘modern model’ of science-policy relationship evident in the IPBES process with scientists delivering evidence to policy makers, will neither help us understand the biodiversity problem nor formulate and implement an effective public policy for conservation. Using a case analysis, it brings evidence on why a GA that generates knowledge for policy makers should worry about the nature and credibility of knowledge-policy relationships. The paper concludes that public engagement in policy analysis is crucial for ownership and further action on the IPBES report; what we need is scientists and policy makers who understand and explicitly state the institutions (rules and norms) that govern their sciences and policies as well as relationships between the two.

Two major knowledge-policy engagements, Herculean efforts by IPBES experts (natural and social sciences) to (1) include and integrate indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) in the assessment, and (2) deliver the scientific evidence to policy makers, caused vexation within the arena of knowledge generation itself (Turnhout et al. 2016; Montana 2017). Though it is known that how we know and how we act upon the environment are dialectically related (Turnhout et al. 2016), the literature on the IPBES process somehow takes these relationships for granted. This is discussed in this paper as the "Knowledge-policy relationships in IPBES". Following this, the dialectical relationship evident in the protocols of the Maldhari community in the Banni grasslands in India is presented as a case study “Knowledge and policy for conservation in Banni”. It shows the co-evolution of knowledge generation and policy making for biodiversity conservation and the processes by which the plurality of knowledge and the evidence of this knowledge are integrated into policy or decision making. The institutions or norms of the ‘Maldhari way of life’ govern both knowledge and policy or protocols. The section on “Institutions: knowing and governing biodiversity” analyses the institutions, rules and norms of IPBES as a GA and those developed and used by the community, revealing the co-production of knowledge and social order (Jasanoff 2004), in both these epistemic configurations. We ask why the IPBES conceptual framework rules out crucial institutional questions within knowledge generation; it is ‘how we know’ or the evolution of the cognitive order with the social order, that decides what we do with knowledge. In the IPBES conceptual framework the ‘performativity of knowledge and the intimate connections between power and knowledge’ (Turnhout et al. 2016, p. 70) are not seen as constitutive of the direct and indirect drivers of nature and human well-being. With no opportunity to analyse existing institutions and the policies for biodiversity conservation, IPBES obsequiously delivers scientific truth to policy makers. The paper makes a plea (in “Conclusion”) to ensure public engagement in the co-creation of knowledge and policy for biodiversity. A re-presentation of and public debates on this GA, with diverse actors in different national and local contexts is an option to ensure commitment and action for conservation. Most importantly, this public engagement seems essential for the sciences (natural and social) to maintain excellence, credibility and relevance in these troubled times.

Knowledge-policy relationships in IPBES

Global environmental assessments mark the early decades of the twenty-first century. They address unresolved sustainability questions from the twentieth century. It is expected that national governments that ratify these assessments will comply with or take up the evidence generated by these assessments to formulate and implement policies within their nations. In this section we review the knowledge-policy relationship in the IPBES process, asking why we expect this expectation to hold.

The past GAs have taught us that the policy acceptance of most transnational or global environmental knowledge has been rather limited at the national level. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) (following the Global Biodiversity Assessment), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the most recent Aichi biodiversity targets (of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) set in 2010, to be implemented 2011–2020, are all GAs that have emphasised the need for national policies (Borie et al. 2015; Bridgewater et al. 2019). But they faced, at best, a half-hearted acknowledgement from most governments (Leadley et al. 2014). Similar targets and action plans to reduce emissions, sequester carbon and reduce pollution, and conserve biodiversity in response to several GAs, remain mere references in policy documents in many developed and developing countries. Armed with this knowledge, IPBES aimed to ‘build capacities that strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long term human well-being and sustainable development’ (IPBES 2012). There were many who knew that it was not enough to generate global scientific knowledge about biodiversity and ‘strengthen the science-policy relationships,’ because policy formulation is the result of several other factors and interactions (Briggs and Knight 2011) including conscious efforts to build capacities and engage with the policy community (Perrings et al. 2011). The latter was possible only if local experiences and local expertise were included (Hulme et al. 2011). In IPBES the activity of generating knowledge based on peer-reviewed knowledge integrating ILK, fraught with knowledge politics and conscious consensus-building efforts (Esguerra et al. 2017), was confined to knowledge actors.

Science as codified and organized knowledge faces problems in its attempts to include multiple forms of community-based informal, indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) in the assessment (Obermeister 2018; Esguerra et al. 2017). The messy knowledge politics of the environmental models and scenarios developed and of decisions made within a GA (Turnhout et al. 2016; Feldman et al. 2010), is subsumed in the assessment process as a necessary condition for the internal consensus that knowledge has to have to influence policy. The social sciences in the IPBES process are meant to ensure that the models of drivers are specifically tailored to the needs of different policy or decision contexts (IPBES 2016: 103, quoted in Obermeister 2018, p. 10); revealing a normative element shaping the generation of knowledge, to gain acceptance within certain preconceived or perceived policy demands. The socialisation and politicisation of science and the scientisation of public policy and politics (Weingart 1999) is nothing new. But the internal concerns within IPBES to generate knowledge for policy makers, reveals the unquestioning faith in the ‘modern model’ of science-policy relationship—one where truth is delivered to power.

The IPBES conceptual framework represents different ways of knowing nature and biodiversity, and how nature’s services affect human well-being (Diaz et al 2015). But …

… the broad category of ‘nature’s benefits to people’ is framed as ‘ecosystem goods and services’ as part of western science-based knowledge, and as ‘nature’s gifts’ as part of other knowledge systems. (Turnhout et al. 2016, p. 68–69).

The conceptual framework sets out what ‘knowledge is relevant and for whom’ and its meanings for communities that hold ILK (ibid).

There are several questions about this cognitive order or ways of knowing nature (Borie et al. 2015; Montana 2017; Turnhout et al. 2016; Obermeister 2018). But there are few who ask if global knowledge within the given structure and norms of IPBES can influence policy out there. That national governments are the key stakeholders, the main clients of the IPBES assessment (Redford et al. 2012; Larigauderie and Mooney 2010), is accepted unquestioningly. There is a faith that national governments who have no regard for local communities or biodiversity will pay heed to ‘global knowledge’ that integrates or at least highlights ILK, in making decisions about biodiversity conservation. This faith stems from an imagination of scientific truth; an objective neutral global knowledge from nowhere (Borie et al. 2015; Turnhout et al. 2016). Drawing upon the same norms of ‘neutral knowledge’ (temperature) offered by the IPCC, the IPBES provides evidence of the global value of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

There is a problematic circularity at work here: scientific knowledge and its attendant political rationality defines the object of climate and biodiversity governance. The same forms of global knowledge, now under demand for ever-greater precision, are then used by new global governance systems to regulate the planet to this end. Knowledge and power embrace tightly as globalized knowledge conditions the political imaginary of global environmental governance and vice versa: how one knows constrains how one governs and how one governs shapes what one needs to know. (Turnhout et al. 2016 p. 69).

In the countries of the global South biodiversity is conserved for millions of livelihoods, by the knowledge and decision making by holders of rich and diverse ILK. Multinational trade agreements and transnational agrarian movements (Borrass et al. 2008) acknowledge that almost all essential foods (fruits, vegetables, high-value foods and spices, beverages) in the global North depend on conserving biodiversity in Southern nations. National capacity for policy making is also limited in these countries because of the prolonged denationalisation of policy making, excessive centralization of administration and resource allocation in agriculture (Barkin 1987) and forestry (Kashwan 2017). Co-evolving with this, the availability of biodiversity data and capacities of scientists, policy makers and stakeholders to develop models and scenarios, is much higher in the developed parts of the world than in the developing or least developed parts (IPBES 2016). Because biodiversity is best understood and conserved by local communities and indigenous people who live in the biodiversity hotspots (Hulme et al. 2011), it is important to understand how these community institutions or norms for conservation fare, with or against the institutions of the nation state or local government.

However, the mobilization of global scientific knowledge—its generation, scripting, staging, channelling and translation into regulatory instruments as done by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s (Bonneuil and Levidow 2012) becomes the IPBES approach. In both the WTO and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) the international mobilization of science from Codex Alimentaris, the International Office of Epizootics and the International Plant Protection Convention changed the status of scientific expertise. These were no longer organizations with expertise but became authoritative international actors with agency (ibid). This expert authority of science became the evidence provider in adjudicating between protectionist measures and genuine risk measures, between ‘sound science’ and ‘precautionary principle’ etc., as was formulated in WTO disputes. Over 15 years, it became evident that (1) science was not yielding the clear objective standards or measures that were originally hoped for, and (2) scientists were being pressured to transform their reasoning patterns to those of legal reasoning (ibid, pg. 79). The IPBES process had several moments where the science/ non-science and science/economics boundaries were tested and displaced or reconstructed through consensus building processes (Montana 2017; Turnhout et al. 2016; Esguerra et al. 2017), much like the science/law boundaries were in the WTO disputes. The question about presenting evidence of nature’s contributions to human well-being in monetary terms or in other values and measures of well-being, and about integrating ILK into scientific scenarios, reflect the pressures on the sciences (natural and social) to think and measure within the frameworks of economics and valuation of ecosystem services (Obermeister 2018).

Policy makers today cannot but acknowledge the history of science and the pluralism of knowledge, politics and cultures of risk (Jasanoff 2006), and the uncertainties that science confronts (Saltelli and Funtowicz 2017). The vast areas of ignorance, data limits, irrelevant criteria that still prevail with respect to the environment, keep the natural and social sciences on their toes, contesting and demanding new problem statements, experiments and solutions; most importantly, seeking processes to reframe prevalent analytical frameworks to integrate nature, justice and time (Faber 2008). Many of the ‘crisis-aware disciplines, from statistics to medicine, from bibliometrics to biology’ that understand risks and uncertainties in the use of science for policy (Saltelli and Funtowicz 2017, pg. 5) are aware of their own existence within economic legitimizations and the upward accountability of the sciences to the bureaucracy. We need policy makers who know that an argument within the sciences or a debate between the sciences and ILK or cultural knowledge ought to be encouraged and not feared or resented. We also expect that scientists who are part of this neutral global expertise creation are aware of what happens to science when it integrates itself into economic or legal reasoning. We do expect that all the GAs that have expert panels or S and T groups established within to generate knowledge for national and sub-national policy makers to act upon are aware of these risks and uncertainties in the use of science for policy.

Knowledge and policy for conservation in Banni

Herders and pastoralists as holders of ILK are increasingly acknowledged as actors keeping grasslands and biodiversity hotspots alive (Agrawal and Saberwal 2006). The scientific examination and ratification, and registration of pastoral livestock breeds they enabled, were celebrated in the media (Parvaiz 2016). In this section we explore how the pastoralists create knowledge and make decisions; a brief case study of how the community gathers and reviews its ILK and integrates this knowledge with modern scientific and economic (markets) information, to make its decisions.

Many scholars have addressed the need for the sciences to learn from and with local and indigenous knowledge systems, and the role of the social sciences in enabling this learning (Mascia et al. 2003; Lele and Norgaard 2005; Martin-Lopez and Montes 2015). Policy instruments to ensure decentralized democratic and location-specific community knowledge for biodiversity, with direct democracy and local responsibility for nature (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012) are necessary. The state’s policy has been to create “Biodiversity Management Committee (BMC) at the Panchayat level and State Biodiversity Board at the state level” (Planning Commission 2006, pg.2). India’s Biological Diversity Act is based on scientific inventorying and classifying biodiversity and providing scientific evidence of endangered species and threatened habitats. This leads to policies to increase public awareness and urgently enable capacity building for grassroots organizations and communities (ibid). Resource use practices and knowledge regarding the behaviour of complex ecological systems in diverse locations, which have accumulated through observation, verification and validation over generations within communities, are not yet acknowledged as crucial inputs to policy or decision making for conservation (Gadgil et al. 1993).

Learning from the Banni norms

The Banni grasslands in India provide a brief but comprehensively disturbing insight into why community-led knowledge systems cannot sit comfortably with or even be heard within systems where organized scientific knowledge speaks truth to power. These grasslands, 3000 sq kms, are in the Kachchh district of Gujarat state. They are known for socio-cultural uniqueness and biological diversity (Bharwada and Mahajan 2012).

The practices of the Maldharis, the herder-pastoralist communities, have kept these grasslands alive, conserved biodiversity and maintained some specific breeds of livestock over centuries. Over the past few decades, India’s white revolution transformed the livestock sector; especially in Gujarat with its successful dairy cooperatives, cross-breeding of milch cattle for higher yield per animal, and animal husbandry technologies and services. What was previously a multifunctional crop-livestock and rural energy system in Gujarat became a narrow, focused and rapidly growing dairy industry. The Maldharis in these grasslands decided to stay out of these interventions and development programmes.

Banni is an arid region which experiences recurrent drought. The temperature varies from extreme heat during summer, floods during the monsoon and severe cold during winter months (Kumar et al. 2015). The soil of Banni is saline and the salinity varies from moderate to very high salinity with pH ranging between 6.5 and 8.5 (GUIDE 2016). The Banni grassland exhibits tremendous floral and faunal diversity. The grassland is home to many species of trees, grasses and sedges whose composition varies across the region (Patel and Joshi 2011). It is interspersed with wetlands which shelter several species of birds including migratory birds.

The Maldharis and other nomadic pastoralists have been in the region for more than 400 years; they share a genial relationship with the landscape (Bharwada and Mahajan 2012). They have tended and created some of the best breeds of buffalo, cattle, sheep, goat, horse and camel by careful breeding (Jadhav et al. 1992). These breeds exhibit marked endurance and are adapted to extreme temperature conditions with unique feeding and foraging practices. The most prominent are the Kankrej cattle, Banni buffalo, Kachchhi Sindhi Horse and the Kharai camel.

Each breed developed embodies the grassland’s features and the community’s livelihoods–livestock rearing. The choice of secondary or supplementary incomes is contested within the community. When decisions are made for livelihoods other than livestock, they are legitimized as incomes independent of the effect of seasonal or annual variations, which are necessary to buy fodder and feed for their livestock, in the event of droughts or other stress.Footnote 1 Two brief illustrations help us understand the knowledge-policy relationships that this community works with for biodiversity conservation and its own livelihoods.

Grazing protocols

Grazing patches in Banni have been categorized by the Maldharis based on soil types, size, distance from villages and water bodies, quality and availability of drinking water for animals, diversity of grasses, shrubs and trees, and wind direction (BPUMS 2010). This helps them understand and locate different grazing patches in and around each village, fodder species available in different seasons and the quantity of fodder available (Joshi et al. 2009). The norms that the Maldharis have devised for accessing the grazing patches have been mapped by Sahjeevan, a civil society organization (CSO) in Bhuj. The resource use mapping of Dadhhar panchayat, for example, revealed the presence of about 50–55 grazing patches which were shared by 17 villages (Sahjeevan 2012). Some prevalent grazing norms decided through consultations among Maldhari villagers (with men and women participating) are:Footnote 2

  • Sequencing grazing after the rains: to ensure growth stage of grasses, avoid leaches and slugs in the fields and also promote regeneration of the grassland for the next year.

  • Consciously controlling grazing: carefully monitored by stock dispersal.

  • Sharing pastures: a Maldhari camping in another village is a guest, given the expected reciprocation of grazing rights.

  • Observing the cattle’s understanding of grasses and the grassland: the breed’s ability to feed selectively on the diversity, different tastes and quality of grasses.

  • Sharing knowledge and work: for creation of community maintained water harvesting wells (locally called ‘virda’) (Agrawal 2015) to ensure water for cattle even during a prolonged drought.

These protocols come up when the Maldharis discuss new schemes or programmes proposed by the state or a new industry in the neighbourhood. The Maldhari’s fears are palpable; the current understanding of the variability (inter and intra-seasonal), grasses and other fodder that the cattle need (in their food platter), survival of grasses in different temperature, salinity and rainfall regimes, and the little water conservation that they can afford to do in this harsh and variable terrain, will be destroyed by these interventions.

Biocultural protocols

Cattle breeding has been an age old tradition in Banni. The Maldharis consider pastoralism and taking care of livestock as their duty. They consider these treasured breeds of Banni not only as an asset but as part of their ‘way of life’. The products they get from livestock, and thereby yield per animal, is a minor part of their relationship with the livestockFootnote 3. They value adaptation, wellbeing, diversity of feed, low disease infestations, and health of the calf, and not just milk yield.

Whether the Banni buffalo or the Kankrej cattle, the Maldharis have developed their own breeding protocols. The stud bulls are exchanged or purchased within the Maldhari community itself to maintain the pure line of the breed. The lineage and phenotypic characteristics that the Maldharis follow for selection of the (Kankrej) bull includes family history for at least four generations. Decisions are made based on the elder’s advice; the elders who have kept oral records of cattle and their lineage. The features like body build (height, length), horns (semi-circular horns), long ears, tail hair, colour of the skin etc.; history of disease in the father and mother; mother’s milk production; impregnating capacity of the father; amiable nature of the mother to its calf and also to its keeper are tallied against other selected stud bulls (Focus Group Discussion (FGD), 11th February 2017). The social memory and oral record of geneology of their own cattle and also of other Maldharis, aid in the selection of the breeding bull.Footnote 4

Today, the Maldharis fear loss of their culture and biological knowledge. With the dams constructed on the streams and rivers that traverse and border the grasslands (since the 1960s), the land–water relationships, and soil salinity have changed. One particular intervention by the Forest Department in the 1990s, for greening the Banni grasslands, the propagation of Prosopis juliflora, misfired badly. The toxic pods of the tree caused indigestion and loss of their favourite Kankrej cattle by the hundreds. Traditional ‘desi babul’ a variety of the same Prosopis species and several other shrubs that are excellent foraging material were taken over by this invasive species (BPUMS 2010). Since then, the Banni buffalo has become the dominant livestock in the grasslands.

The Maldharis, like many pastoralists, are wary of the programmes of the state and industry (Raina and Dey 2016). The collective effort that the Maldhari community put forward for continuing their stewardship of Banni against different kinds of private ownership and development schemes, led to their ‘Biocultural Community Protocol’ (BCP) in 2010 (BPUMS 2010). The development and formal statement of this protocol was the result of a process- an acknowledgement of the plurality of knowledge and a conscious integration between ILK and scientific knowledge.

In 2003–2004, scientists from National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources (NBAGR) took the initiative to form a Chilika Breeders Association in Odisha, with the involvement of local people. The Association was formed to register the Chilika buffalo with NBAGRFootnote 5. However, the efforts in Odisha were not successful. Several years later Sahjeevan with the scientists from NBAGR helped form a Breeders’ Association in Banni. This was a process of public dialogue creating knowledge and policy, with the environmental knowledge and values of the Maldharis and that of the scientists in NBAGR, the State Agricultural University and the Gujarat Department of Agriculture.

The initiative to organize a Pashu mela (cattle fair) in Banni, Kachchh in January 2008 was the first step towards organizing people to congregate for the cause—to draw recognition of their best breeds i.e., Banni buffalo (BPUMS 2010). The Pashu mela at Banni led to the initiation of the process for the formation of a Breeders’ Association called Banni Pashu Ucherak Maldhari Sangathan/Banni Breeders’ Association (BPUMS) which was finally registered as a society in 2009 (BPUMS 2010). The association filed an application for registration of the Banni buffalo as a distinct breed. The cattle fair was a process of public engagement; NBAGR’s genotyping, involving mutual translation and integration of community assessment and scientific traits for breed identification, confirmed the Banni buffalo as a distinct breed. It was finally registered in 2010Footnote 6. This attempt was successful and the process adopted by BPUMS for the registration of the Banni breed was acknowledged by NBAGR. Since then, several lesser-known breeds from different states in the country have received similar recognition.

With the BCP this small pastoral community changed the landscape of science-policy relationships—at least in the conservation of livestock biodiversity. However, the Maldharis worry that the state and its scientists are only acknowledging their livestock breeds, milk yields (ecosystem services), and their new dairy, including the procurement and marketing of camel milk (at very high prices and urban demand). They fear that the state is incapable of registering their ‘way of life’ as part of the grasslands and biodiversity. The community demands recognition of customary and legal rights under the controversial Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, of the Government of India, to reside, conserve and sustainably use Banni grassland. The state’s new legal and policy provisions to grant individual property ‘rights’ is worrisome. The Maldharis want the state to recognize their collective community ownership, customary grazing rights in Banni to protect their traditional way of life which has always played an important role in conserving the Banni ecosystem. They demand public engagement; that the state consult the Banni Breeders’ Association before any policy decision on the conservation or development of Banni is made. They ask that all permits given to the industries around the grasslands be ended, so as to reduce the potential harm to the grasslands from the industrial effluents (BPUMS 2010).

The BCP and the public engagement by scientists, administrators and the community in the registration of the Banni buffalo, acknowledged community knowledge. It also built scientific capacities to observe and record the meanings of the evidence that comes from the field. For the Maldhari, knowledge of the grasslands and the breeds come from nature and their commitment to living with the variability and diversity of nature. Their rules and norms, embodied in their grazing protocols, the breeding protocols now expanded to an inclusive BCP, draws from their principle of ‘living lightly and giving back to nature.’ The Maldhari way of life is within and shaped by the ways of working of their environment. This co-evolution of biodiversity, communities and ecosystems, the ability to establish institutions or rules that use and conserve nature, is a case of co-production of social values, environmental knowledge and policy decisions.

Local traditional knowledge systems that have over time developed their knowledge and policy-making capacities for multiple species management, resource rotation, and landscape patchiness management, also have the adaptive capacity to respond to ecological surprises and ecosystem fluxes (Berkes et al. 2000). These capacities are crucial for biodiversity conservation. Knowledge that sees itself as delivering absolute truth to decision-makers above, is not the model that the Banni grasslands reveal. These dynamic grasslands and their BCP also teach the sciences how public engagement and reform within the sciences are crucial when the integration of scientific knowledge with ILK is attempted. The framing and articulation of the ‘biocultural’ protocols of the community, tells the state and the scientific community where such integration may be attempted with public consultation and more knowledge, whenever new decisions are needed.

What IPBES needs is intelligent policy makers who can dialogue with and share meanings with those who know; not ones that hide behind ‘scientific truths,’ and demand that more precise truths be constructed through consensus, or the politics of representation, inclusion and integration. If this GA does intend to strengthen knowledge and policy to ensure biodiversity conservation, then it is important to understand and explain the protocols or norms that operate in both—the knowledge and policy-making structures.

Institutions: knowing and governing biodiversity

IPBES is a global organization providing expertise and is also a network of actors, their stakes, rules and norms (Bridgewater et al. 2019; Obermeister 2018; Turnhout et al. 2016). The shared meanings and the co-evolving cognitive order and social order are evident in IPBES, just as they are in Banni. The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019) provides scientific evidence about biodiversity loss and its drivers, stating that we, human beings, should change our ways of working. In effect, change our institutions. In this section, we analyze the institutions in IPBES and in Banni. Institutions, defined as ‘the conventions, norms and legal rules of a society’ ….that ‘regularize life, support values and protect and produce interests’ (Vatn 2006, pg. 2; Veblen 1919), govern knowledge and policy. How do they figure in this GA?

It is not so much the inclusion of ‘indigenous and local knowledge systems, which can be complementary to the science-based models’ (IPBES 2013, pg. 1) that helps produce knowledge for policy change. It is the complementarity of the institutions that govern both knowledge systems and their interactions with nature that matters; a complementarity that demands compatibility and commensurability of institutions and values (Vatn 2006; Martinez-Alier et al. 1997). It is this complementarity of shared values and institutions that is compromised by the IPBES conceptual framework heralded as a “Rosetta Stone” enabling the representation and translation between diverse knowledge systems (Turnhout et al. 2016). In the IPBES framework institutions are placed in a box (Diaz et al. 2015, pg. 5, Fig. 1), between good life (human wellbeing) and nature (biodiversity and ecosystems). They come from nowhere. They “are the underlying causes of change generated outside the ecosystem in question (i.e., outside the nature box of Fig. 1)” (Diaz et al. 2015, pg.6), where nature, we are told, has nothing to do with our observations of nature and how we structure or codify this knowledge (be it ILK and formal scientific knowledge, or policies). The IPBES conceptual framework has been criticised for working like a boundary object ‘resulting from a process in which experts forged a hard-won compromise amidst controversy about science, local and indigenous knowledge, ecosystem services and the commodification of nature’ (Turnhout et al. 2016, pg 69; Borie and Hulme 2015). Given the Maldhari ‘way of life’ or values, their knowledge and decision making, we can now see how this conceptual framework works as a boundary object. It enables the decoupling of values, rules and norms from the direct drivers that affect nature and human well-being.

The institutions or rules and norms that gave birth to ecosystem services are embedded in the history of economic thought (Gomez-Bagethun et al. 2010). It was only after economics made the estimation of ecosystem services and biodiversity easier, by placing institutions, rules and norms outside the direct drivers of environmental change (our policies and economic activities) that the concept of ‘ecosystem services’ was converted from being an eye-opener for the world’s decision makers and all production and consumption activities, into an uncritically accepted scientific value for decision making (Norgaard 2009).

Science reflects the commitments of the institutional and political cultures in which it is located (Jasanoff 2004). Any attempt at strengthening knowledge-policy relationships for biodiversity should involve analysis of the policy discourse on the valuation of ecosystem services and mental models of nature and biodiversity. The neo-positivist and critical rationalist policy analysis and use of evidence for policy experimentation and policy-making, implementation and learning have over the latter half of the twentieth century, given way to more democratic critical-theoretical approaches and participatory policy analysis approaches (Hoppe 1999). Critical-theoretical concerns point out that robust policy analysis and policy-making should acknowledge political interactions that do and do not elicit true learning among citizens. Building on these concerns, advances in participatory policy analysis bring citizens knowledge and participation in the policy process. Here a panel of citizens (even if they run into hundreds and thousands) is at the heart of the policy analytic process (Hoppe 1999). Analysis, beginning with decisions on what counts as evidence and the kind of experiments needed, involves citizens and scientists (as in the Banni cattle fair). Public engagement in the co-creation of social values and environmental knowledge whether of soil (Blaikie 1985) or biodiversity conservation (Bharwada and Mahajan 2012), demand changes within the knowledge organizations/communities and in knowledge-policy relationships. The chasm between science and society on the one hand and science and policy on the other does not exist in these panels.

IPBES is demonstrably located in the ‘modern model’ of science speaking truth to power, with policy makers responsibly accepting the scientific evidence to act on what this evidence suggests. It could not consider the ‘public engagement model’ of argumentative policy process of making sense together. When Hoppe (1999) advocates a post-positivist policy analysis and decision making where the public and public debate and not the state and its policy makers take centre stage, it is imperative that processes like IPBES create such spaces as active democratic knowledge-policy engagements. What the IPBES Chair should worry about is the absence of the intelligent, politically astute and committed policy maker who understands the changes needed in the rules and norms of policy-making. Biodiversity conservation needs policy makers willing to participate in policy analysis; in participatory knowledge generation and argumentative public engagement in policy-making.

Conclusion

We began this paper highlighting the need to take forward the IPBES findings and convert them to policy processes that will help us live with the other species that inhabit our planet. This demands acknowledgement and confrontation of the institutions or bonds we created to suppress nature. For the credibility of the sciences (natural and social) and for robust policy decisions that promote biodiversity, it is crucial that both scientists and policy makers understand and explicitly state the institutions that govern their sciences and policies as well as the mutual relationships between knowledge and policy. It is only by acknowledging the latter, that scientists and policy makers begin to see what science is; a process and the best one we have (Shapin 2006; Gluckman 2014). The credibility of assessment reports [even with the options for action identified by a credible group of experts (Watson 2012)] and policy advice are only strengthened by recognizing the limits of science and allowing it to embellish and gain from public engagement. For instance, if we recognize that climate change debates are about intergenerational economic interests and not primarily about data or scientific models (Gluckman 2014), the onus for responsible decision making is on policy makers and not on climate scientists. To acknowledge and celebrate the symphony of pluralistic debates on science and within science (Visvanathan 1997), to keep science alive as the best knowledge option we have, science has to be forewarned and forearmed about policy makers who ‘use’ science to legitimize prevalent economic interests and political cultures.

Given the messy politics of knowledge-policy relations (Feldman et al. 2010) pro-active efforts to confront these are crucial. Success in biodiversity conservation demands a substantial increase in public availability of data and information to promote learning and transparency (Redford et al. 2012) and more knowledgeable public dialogue. This paper highlights the need to consider an alternative positioning of IPBES as a global knowledge-policy facilitating organization than as a knowledge generator supplying ‘global’ scientific knowledge to policy makers in national governments. It argues that this re-positioning would serve the biodiversity conservation cause as well as the causes of robust dynamic science, thriving ILK and indigenous community protocols and policies.