Governing biodiversity through offshore wind park tenders: A comparison of England and the Netherlands

As the construction of offshore wind parks expand globally, questions are being raised about their impacts on marine biodiversity. To mitigate these impacts, countries are embedding biodiversity conservation and restoration within their offshore wind tendering process. These tenders not only determine the technical design of offshore wind parks but also coordinate decisions on what kinds of biodiversity to conserve, enhance and/or restore. Using an inscription framework this paper compares how biodiversity assumptions and priorities influence the design of these tendering processes in England and the Netherlands. These cases show the different ways tendering processes constitute de facto approaches to biodiversity governance that demonstrate how institutional assumptions and priorities co-determine which future biodiversities are mitigated, enhanced or protected. By unpacking this black box of assumptions, priorities and ways of knowing, tendering processes can be made more reflexive, opening up deliberation on what kinds of biodiversity are being enacted through biodiversity assessments and tendering criteria, holding implications for future biodiversities associated with the expansion of marine infrastructure. • Tendering processes create conditions for acceptable biodiversity impact. • England inscribes a natural, mitigated and compliant biodiversity. • The Netherlands inscribes an interventionist, experimental and innovative biodiversity. • Tendering processes are governance processes enacting desirable future biodiversities. • Inscription allows for reflexivity in how future biodiversities are enacted.