Just like with any strategic intervention, it is important to understand the environment in which you are operating or trying to influence before deciding what is the best approach to use.
Photo: IUCN-Nadine McCormick
Therefore, before embarking on any engagement with business, the first step is to understand your situation. The below list of questions can help frame your context:
Which country/landscape/site are you targeting?
- To help ensure any engagement is strategic, be aware of what is already happening in your regional context with respect to relevant policies and conservation plans. IBAT Country Profiles are a useful starting point for understanding protected areas and key biodiversity areas within a country/territory, presenting the overall level of protection and the extent to which sites important for biodiversity are protected.
- A collaborative landscape drawing exercise, such as Rich Pictures, can be useful with a group of stakeholders to help develop a shared understanding of what is happening in the landscape (see photo of example from Ghana.
What is the natural resource governance context?
- The IUCN Natural Resource Governance Framework provides a robust, inclusive, and credible approach to assessing and strengthening natural resource governance with 10 principles and criteria to help guide your assessment.
- Legal and policy frameworks are particularly relevant for driving corporate behaviour (see next section). You can easily search for relevant laws through Ecolex, a comprehensive source of information on environmental law.
What are the biodiversity and/or social issues that you are looking to address?
- The Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) can be a useful starting point to identify protected areas, key biodiversity areas and species in your context. Tutorials are available here.
What industry/sectors are present in the targeted landscape and what are their typical impacts and dependencies on nature?
- To identify potential impacts and dependencies on nature of the different business sectors in your landscape, you can use the tool ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure), developed by the Natural Capital Finance Alliance in partnership with UNEP-WCMC. (See explanatory video here in English and Spanish).
What are the characteristics of the sector(s)?
- Is it composed of state-owned or privatized business? This is relevant to determine the required approach as practices of stateowned companies can only be influenced through trade/investment law.
- Is it composed by foreign or local business? This question is essential as this will determine the type of law that we need to look at the law of the host or the home country of the company.
- How big are the companies in this sector? This is relevant, for example, because small and medium enterprises (SMEs), would require different incentives than other types of businesses.
- What kind of licences do the companies in this sector have, e.g., do they include local content clauses?
Which stakeholders are relevant?
- An actor mapping exercise can be helpful to identify which stakeholders to focus on, based on whether they are potential allies, blockers or supporters. Note: it could also be helpful to think beyond actors in the landscape and identify who has influence with these actors.
With the above taken into consideration, your next step is to identify the change you want to see, which is covered in the next section.
Useful resources
- IUCN Natural Resource Governance Framework Assessment Guide
- Presentation slides and speaking notes for a 2-hour workshop (PDF) – “Why engage business,” exercises on setting the scene (slides 17-19), and understanding the situation (slides 20-24)
- Introduction presentation to the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT) – English (PDF)
- Présentation sur l’outil IBAT- français (PDF)
