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Involving non-human stakeholders in wetland management: hurdles and perspectives

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Meinard, Yves | Georges, J.Y. | Romaniuk, Patrycja

Edité par CCSD -

International audience. Recent years have seen changes in environmental management practices, which have consisted in increasingly involving stakeholders in decision-making.However, this increased inclusion has left aside a whole category of stakeholders whose wellbeing, and even very existence, is at stake in environmentaldecisions: individuals and populations of non-human species. The main reason underlying this exclusion is that, as opposed to humans, non-humans canneither speak nor vote in collective deliberations and discussions. Here we explore options to overcome this difficulty and thereby include non-humans in environmental decision-making, in the case of wetland management. Three main approaches are compared in terms of relative strengths and weaknesses :i) Empathy consists in striving to take non-human pain and pleasure into account when deciding between alternative courses of action; ii) Interest-basedinclusion generalizes the empathic approach by including non-human interests that cannot easily be understood as pain and pleasure, such as the wellbeingof non-sentient beings; iii) “Tentative representation”, which refers to attempts, by human stakeholders, to act as representatives of non-human entities.Using concrete examples in wetland conservation, including our project Emys-R (www.emysr.cnrs.fr), we argue that tentative representation is the mostpromising and practical approach, and we outline operational reforms needed to institutionalize it in wetland management practice.

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