In The Weeds: A Review and Synthesis on Invasive Species Governance

Abstract

As distant places become ever more connected through the movement of goods and people around the globe, non-native plant and animal species are provided with new avenues to spread. Effectivde management of invasive plants requires not only knowledge of methods for control and eradication, but also knowledge of the factors that enable and inhibit coordination and cooperation—collective action—between disparate actors. To date, the literature on invasive species has focused almost exclusively on managing invasions from a technical perspective, with much less focus on governance factors like behavior change, coordination, and collective action. To fill this gap, we undertake a systematic review to learn (1) how much research has been done to understand the social and governance factors related to effective management of invasive plants, (2) what aspects of governance factors has this research focused on, (3) what are the gaps in the literature, and, based on these gaps, (4) what are the most pressing future research needs. We based our search terms on the North American Invasive Species Network’s (NAISN) invasive plant list of 357 species. This search resulted in 186,789 journal articles. We used a filtering process to determine articles were relevant to our research questions. Using this filtering process, we found that less than 0.03% of invasive plant literature explores aspects of governance. We share the results of our analysis of these articles, including common approaches to stakeholder engagement and collaboration, the reported effectiveness of different collaborative approaches, and gaps in knowledge. We find that research has begun to recognize invasive species as a collective action problem and identifies cooperation and stakeholder engagement as important factors. However, researchers lack a shared framework that would guide high-quality, empirical analysis of invasive species governance as a complex socio-ecological problem.