Why promoting democratic conservation governance requires less stakeholder engagement

Better governance is fundamental to successful conservation, but waves of political populism and erosion of the public sphere are rendering conservation governance progressively more difficult. We suggest citizen engagement presents an intuitive response to governance crises, but that stakeholder engagement may represent precisely the wrong type of public participation due to overreliance on vertical dimensions of democracy. We outline the etiology of stakeholder engagement and explain how it hollows out the public sphere by optimizing predetermined private interests, anchoring citizens in those predetermined interests, collapsing intersectionality in citizens’ values, and reifying dominance by political elites. We argue these pathological outcomes extend logically from the stakeholder model of citizen engagement. We suggest conservation biologists consider an alternative to stakeholder engagement designed to remove stakes, engage citizens as individuals, and empower citizens to articulate arguments for common conservation interests. This approach is more suited for rebuilding horizontal dimensions of democratic conservation governance and thereby making such governance more resilient than stakeholder approaches. We conclude by describing one approach for building horizontal dimensions of democracy, Future Creation Workshops, and explaining how such approaches can empower citizens to collaborate on conservation efforts while also leveraging facilitation skills within the community of conservation practitioners.