Avoiding an anticipated social-ecological trap in biodiversity conservation on private lands in Quebec province, Canada

During the last decades, global conservation efforts shifted from a mostly top-down process to preserve ecosystems on public lands to diverse governance processes involving stakeholders and conservation on private lands. Following these trends, the Quebec government (Canada) also engaged in biodiversity conservation efforts on private lands to reduce perceived environmental injustice arising from imposed conservation measures. However, citizen involvement has remained mainly a communicative or consultative participation, lacking effective citizen contribution. Based on our work with conservation actors in Quebec, we present a double-loop social-ecological (SE) trap that we foresee for conservation measures implemented on private lands used for production purposes. We used the SE-AS framework to illustrate the SE trap which suggests that including merely consultative landowner participation in the design of conservation measures might lead to a misunderstanding of both the production ecosystems dynamics and the interests and concerns of landowners. This misunderstanding could result in a mismatch between conservation measures and production ecosystems, lower production, lost opportunities and disengagement from conservation measures on the part of landowners. Such a context could, in turn, induce decision-makers to perceive participative efforts as failures, resulting in the re-establishment of top-down decision-making. Ultimately, landowners might react to these imposed conservation measures just as they did in the past, perceiving them as environmental injustice and refusing to comply. We conclude that effective landowner participation through active involvement in cooperative planning and co-management, supported by a systemic perspective, would allow better integration of the knowledge and concerns of landowners, and ultimately, better integration of conservation efforts with production activities. • An anticipated social-ecological trap might hamper biodiversity conservation on private lands in Quebec province, Canada. • Communication/consultation strategies are insufficient to meet the need for participatory approaches in conservation. • True participation through deliberation or collaborative management might help avert social-ecological traps. • Concepts such as adaptive or anticipatory governance can help integrate citizen participation in decision-making processes.