Integrating biodiversity: A big data analysis of Swiss policy sectors and stages

Biodiversity is affected by a number of policies such as agriculture, tourism, housing, energy, and trade. To ensure its protection, most countries have committed themselves to a biodiversity integration strategy – that is the inclusion of measures to monitor, conserve, and promote biodiversity into all relevant policy areas. When evaluating the integration process, however, the focus so far has been primarily on policy outputs (i.e. the implementation stage). Little is therefore known about the inclusion of biodiversity aspects in both the legislative formulation and the judicial application of critical policies. Yet, these are crucial stages of the policy process that could explain or even compensate for a lack of integration in the implementation stage. Furthermore, the integration of biodiversity may differ across stages as different actors are involved, different decision-making rationales apply, and different capacities for integration exist. In this paper, we address this gap by asking how biodiversity is integrated in the formulation, implementation, and application stages across policy areas in Switzerland. The typical qualitative/case study approach to address policy integration struggles with analyzing different stages of a policy process over time in a systematic and statistically representative way. To escape this problem, we apply a quantitative approach that allows us to systematically analyze all relevant parliamentary proceedings, laws, regulations, and court decisions produced by Swiss federal institutions over the past 20 years. Our main tool is a purpose-built dictionary consisting of biodiversity-specific expressions representing all key facets of the concept. Based on the criteria proposed by Kivimaa and Mickwitz (2006), we assess (1) whether or not biodiversity issues are covered by the documents (inclusion), (2) whether or not a shared understanding of the issue among actors and policies across different sectors and stages exists (consistency), (3) as well as the relative priority given to biodiversity in different policy sectors (weighting). With our quantitative approach relying on computational methods, we depart from the widely used case study approach and are able to deliver a representative assessment of biodiversity integration across different policy areas and across different stages of the policy process within those areas. As a consequence we gain a better understanding of where issues in implementing and enforcing effective biodiversity measures occur.