By SCB-ES Board Members, Guy Pe'er
It’s -2C and snowing outside. The train system does not cordially support the timely arrival of people at the World Conference Centre in Bonn, but we still managed to gather: One day before the opening of the IPBES, about 100 people, generally aggregated under the term stakeholders, convene and try to shape their discussion and contribution to the first IPBES plenary.
Sitting at the same hall where governmental delegations will convene from tomorrow and on, and knowing that soon we will move to the back of the hall, we share the vision that IPBES is perhaps one of the most important global science-policy interfaces on environmental topics. We thus try to jointly shape a message that will help us in making our voices heard.
A diversity of people, shared by their concern for the fate of the environments, seem to also share a concern that IPBES has, well, not really forgotten us but put perhaps did not yet encompass how central external stakeholders are to the very basic functioning of IPBES.
IPBES is defined a process where governments and stakeholders interact to guide future policies. IPBES seems to accordingly recognize the importance of knowledge-holders, indigenous people and an even much broader range of groups and people who could and should be incorporated into this process.At the same time, all of this immense diversity of partners is summarized by one word: “observers”. Hmm, isn’t it a bit over-simplified?
