A university for ducks? Reframing biodiversity work as multispecies negotiation

Abstract

In recent years, an increased emphasis on promoting ‘biodiversity’ in organisational spaces has emerged through initiatives such as ‘green roofs’, ‘living walls’, bird boxes, and at a larger scale, wildlife reserves. The human and organisational costs and benefits of these initiatives have been well documented, but there has been scant consideration of the long-term challenges involved in managing the competing interests of the human and nonhuman actors that come into contact through these biodiversity projects. As this article outlines, more than just simply marking out a ‘wildlife friendly’ area, biodiversity initiatives unavoidably require organisations to – consciously or unconsciously – make politically-charged choices about the parameters of acceptable human intervention, the privileging of certain species over others, and the meaning of biodiversity itself. We argue here that biodiversity should be conceived of as a process infused by politics arising from the different capacities and intentions of humans and animals which come into contact along spatial borderlines. Drawing on qualitative and archival data, and utilising relational perspectives within organisational human-animal studies, this study explores multispecies negotiations within a research framework for organisational studies of biodiversity initiatives in workplace settings.