Growing awareness on the social and economic dependency on nature and therefore its restoration is reflected in the proliferation of international, national and local institutions designed to facilitate investment and action in nature recovery [1]. However, co-ordinating activities and developing coherent plans at a landscape scale when these are enabled by private finance present a significant challenge for effective and equitable nature recovery. Moreover, increasing organisational and institutional complexity resulting from an ever more decentralised policy agenda challenges our ability to promote and incentivise the scale up of those specific socially equitable and ecologically resilient financialised nature recovery models [2].
By working in collaboration with the Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership (OLNP), this doctoral project aims to provide an enhanced understanding of the of the financial, social-institutional and ecological outcomes that different models of employing nature finance realise on the ground. The project hopes to contribute towards three main objectives:
- Re-centering stakeholders perspective and values to understand social justice implications of biodiversity finance while avoiding prescription of academic categories of justice distant from local beneficiaries;
- Exploring models of deploying biodiversity finance in a socially equitable and ecological sustainable way while fulfilling private funders’ set returns on investment;
- Reconsidering the role of the public sector in facilitating blended finance models effective alternative models that have remained marginal to date.
Drawing on qualitative participatory methods—including documentary analysis , unstructured narrative interviews, semi-structured participatory mapping interviews, and policy labs, the project is designed on the theoretical backdrop of critical institutional theory [3] and multi-dimensional social justice [4] while contributing to the more applied field of organisation management through the framework of sustainable business models or institutional arrangements for nature [5]. This encounter can positively contribute to the much needed exploration and innovation of biodiversity finance governance, right when the World is almost entirely relying on this approach to save our precious landscapes and their communities [1].
1. Deutz et al., 2020.
2. Svensson et al., 2025; Karolyi and Tobin-de la Puente, 2023.
3. Whaley, 2018; Cleaver, 200
4. Stanley et al., 2025; Löfqvist et al., 2023; Osborne et al., 2021; Svarstad & Benjaminsen, 2020.
5. Arjaliès and Banerjee, 2024; Toxopeus and Merfeld, 2023; Pedersen et al., 2021.
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