From Equivocality to Reflexivity in Biodiversity Protection

Abstract

This article focuses on the silent conversations by individual change makers reflecting on their concerns in relation to their social and natural worlds. We investigate the internal and external deliberations that informants have by using a qualitative theory-building approach in the empirical context of a biodiversity protection issue field in Finland. We conduct 27 interviews with individual change makers representing three types of organizations: government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and businesses. We seek to understand how change makers advancing biodiversity protection reflexively manage the uncertainty and equivocality they face in the interstitial issue field in the course of their change efforts. Our results show that change makers engage in three iterative actions around the issue of biodiversity: filtering, modeling, and translating. They therefore find nuanced ways to convey the biodiversity issue to their stakeholders and, in this way, promote the engagement of other organizational and individual actors in its protection.