As a result of the unprecedented rate of human-induced climate change, there is now widespread consensus that unless proactive adaptation efforts are embraced, significant and sustained biodiversity loss will result, intensifying the species degradation already occurring due to non-climate factors. While conservation biologists have dramatically improved scientific understanding of climate impacts to biodiversity, as well as tools to contend with the challenge, the influence of this knowledge in shaping policy responses has been limited. Yet, institutional coordination for biodiversity will be essential in a changing climate (Lovejoy and Hannah, 2005).

While no policies have yet to contend with the magnitude of the problem as defined by scientific assessments, a few jurisdictions have developed adaptation policies for enhancing biodiversity resilience in a changing climate. However, an unexplored puzzle has emerged: these policies have diverged with regard to the rate of policy advancement, with some jurisdictions embracing adaptation policies more readily than others.

The policy sciences literature has developed a range of complementary and competing theories to explain why some policies progress along the policy cycle more quickly than others. This dissertation offers an original conceptual framework for analyzing science's role in policy advancement, disaggregating the notion of “science” according to the three dominant paradigms of policy change in the policy sciences literature: institutionalist-, actors-, and ideas-based accounts. Research tested the relative explanatory power of these paradigms in the rate of adaptation policymaking for conserving biodiversity. Prevailing science-policy theories were evaluated for their ability to explain policy advancement in five cases: the international biodiversity and climate regimes; Australia; Finland; Canada; and the United States. In cases of policy advancement, empirical research found that unique institutional configurations facilitated the exchange of scientists with the policy process, catalyzing policy progression.

This dissertation aims to improve theoretical understandings of policy change in an effort to advance adaptation policies for biodiversity conservation. The empirical findings also pave the way for a concluding section on policy prescriptions; the research is designed to uncover bottlenecks that exist in linking scientists and scientific knowledge to policy advancement and, in so doing, recommends strategies for removing these hurdles.