Meeting see original for rights

Many individuals and parties (together called stakeholders) can be involved in a biodiversity decision making process, all with their own interests.

We are mostly dealing with European, national and regional level. Some general similarities between interests of parties are likely, and are indeed observed in the BESAFE results. Parties and people can loosely and very generally be arranged according to their interest:

Authorities and the people representing them (e.g. Politicians, Policy makers (environmental), Policy makers (other sector), Government Agencies, committees, boards (executive)). From Global to local level, although only the ones on the levels directly affected will usually be directly involved in the process. The other, mostly higher level authorities will be stakeholders in a very general, overarching sense and will be represented through legal and social obligations imposed by laws, overarching policies, agreements and treaties. Their interest is a good representation of all parties they represents and responsible decision making, taking all interests into account and balancing them correctly, within the spectrum of what is right, acceptable, legal and seen as legitimate (examples from BESAFE results).

Parties and people with a direct stake (decisions directly affecting their livelihood or well-being). (e.g. Private companies, public land managers (farmers, foresters etc.), commercial farmers, foresters, gamekeepers, land owners, property owners and residents, users groups (hunters, anglers, tourists etc.)). These parties and people are likely to be much more bound to the governance level where the actual decision making takes place. Some of them may try to force their interest at the costs of the interest of other stakeholders, other may be forced to let livelihood interests prevail over those of biodiversity.

Parties and people with an indirect stake (e.g. NGO’s, biodiversity advocates, scientists, consultancies). All of those can have indirect stakes in the decision making through reputation, jobs and careers, and can in the decision making process have opposing interests.

The general public and media. The public interest is normally represented by the authorities, but they may sometimes wrongly assume that they are aware of what public opinion is. The interest of the media is in the communication between the public and the other parties.

Although direct interests can be very different, BESAFE results indicate there is a general that biodiversity is a moral issue. This is in line with the results of polls etc.