Assessing managerial sensemaking processes of businesses with biodiversity issues

This Phd Project will identify how biodiversity challenges and opportunities affect the sensemaking processes of individual business managers and influence or drive collective nature-positive actions across a range of different business and finance sectors.

Business managers are powerful actors with respect to biodiversity impacts. Businesses can potentially be key drivers of nature-positive solutions. However, before people (managers) - and companies - can more effectively manage biodiversity challenges, they have to make sense of the situational context. Sensemaking is an interpretive process whereby actors, and organisations, interpret social and ecological cues in their surrounding and build cognitive narratives that underlie decisions (Weick et al., 1993; Whiteman & Cooper, 2011).

In a complex environment, managers must pay attention to subtle cues, overcome barriers, and collectively develop 'sensemaking' across organizations which drives decision-making. If people (managers) do not pay sufficient attention, they will encounter a 'predictable surprise' - a crisis situation that could be avoided but isn't because of existing social and economic structures.

In-depth studies of how business and finance managers make sense of biodiversity challenges and opportunities are largely non-existent. This Phd project addresses this gap in the literature through qualitative in-depth interviews and observations of the sensemaking processes of business actors and champions, including the identification of barriers and enablers to effective sensemaking and nature-positive business actions.

Sensemaking ability varies across individuals (Schön, 1983). The Phd candidate will identify and analyse the sensemaking processes across a range of 'nature positive' activities through initiatives such as the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), Business-for-Nature, the UK Business Biodiversity Forum, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) which aims to provide a framework for corporates and financial institutions to assess, manage and report on their dependencies and impacts on nature.

This Phd is part of the RENEW project. A principal goal of the RENEW Studentships programme is to create a new generation of interdisciplinary, solutions-focussed researchers who have experienced a rich culture including fundamental research and engagement with key partners.