Entrepreneurship for biodiversity conservation and sustainability transformation: a new frontier in Conservation Science and Practice

Abstract

Today’s increasing conservation challenges demand new approaches to thinking about and practicing conservation based on solving social problems. I advance understanding of one of such approaches -- Conservation Entrepreneurship, a practice still underexplored in the core conservation literature but that is rapidly growing in the real world and reimagining the conservation field. Based on literature review and evidence synthesis, this dissertation offers a tentative conceptual basis, organizing framework, and research agenda for conservation entrepreneurship research as an applied field of the conservation social sciences. Based on in-depth case study analyses of entrepreneurship cases in the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site Serra da Capivara National Park, Brazil, this dissertation explores the role of entrepreneurial action in two longstanding areas of interest in the conservation field -- (i) transformative approaches to protected area management and (ii) ecosystem services provision – and offers four main contributions. First, it suggests practices for developing organizational and community capacity conducive to sustainability transformations in social-ecological systems where climatic shifts, poverty, governance challenges, and climate-sensitive livelihoods converge to exacerbate the vulnerability of the local communities to climate change. Second, it offers an analytical framework that can be used as a reflexive tool to enhance transparency in the design and implementation choices in entrepreneurship, capacity building, and community development practice for sustainability. Third, this study identifies individual-level factors that influence the recognition of opportunities for novel marketable ecosystem services. Lastly, it shows how entrepreneurial opportunity recognition is a key process for the provision of ecosystem services under climate and other environmental changes.