The emergence of the Biodiversity/Health nexus: making biodiversity a health issue

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a French epistemic community has forged and promoted a Biodiversity/Health nexus, which legitimizes biodiversity as a health issue. The relationship between biodiversity and health is now part of French local government agendas, after being included in new international programs. Based on observation of this nexus’s epistemic community and 35 semi-structured interviews conducted in France between 2017 and 2020, this article aims to show which actors and groups have been forging and promoting this nexus, and to understand how such an emergent environmental nexus challenges the governance of the present biomedical- and technical expertise-based health system. This article discusses environmental nexus from the perspective of building a new cause by reconstituting chains of causality to “demonstrate” the new problem (Barthe, Politix, 23(91), 77–102, 2010), and the growing importance of integration of concepts as a new ideal of policy-making (Cairns & Krzywoszynska, Environmental Science and Policy, 64, 164–170, 2016). As well as a justification (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1991) of their effectiveness in legitimizing the cause of defending biodiversity, environmental nexuses contain a challenge to recognize knowledge, calling for a change in governance methods in a One Health approach.