How 42 Workshops Quietly Built Germany’s Biodiversity Science-Policy Network

When scientists, policymakers, and business leaders sit down at the same workshop table, something quietly powerful happens: networks form. A new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Science has now measured exactly how powerful that effect can be, using nearly a decade of attendance records from Germany’s Network-Forum on Biodiversity Research, known as NeFo. The findings suggest that the humble workshop, often dismissed as an academic formality, may be one of the most effective tools available for stitching together the fragmented worlds of biodiversity science and policy.

NeFo was founded in 2009, three years before the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, came into existence. At the time, Germany’s biodiversity research landscape was diverse but fragmented, with institutions scattered across universities, museums, government agencies, and civil society. NeFo’s mission was to bring these actors together, strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration, and build a bridge between research and policymaking. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and implemented by the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and the Museum for Natural History Berlin, the initiative ran 42 workshops between 2010 and 2018, attracting more than 1,200 participants from 70 countries.

To understand what these workshops actually accomplished, researcher Jonas Geschke of the University of Bern turned to social network analysis, a mathematical framework that maps relationships between actors and quantifies the structure of their connections. Every institution that sent a representative to a NeFo workshop became a node in the network, and any two institutions whose representatives attended the same event were linked. The resulting co-participation network grew from just 55 institutions connected through two workshops in 2010 to 564 nodes spanning 471 named institutions, 14 freelancers, and 79 participants without a declared affiliation by 2018.

The structural evolution of this network tells a compelling story. In the early years, the network was small and tightly knit, with a clustering coefficient of 0.90 and a density of 0.60, meaning most institutions attended the same events. As the network expanded, density naturally declined to 0.16 by 2018, but the average shortest path between any two institutions rose only modestly, from 1.40 to 1.87 steps. This means that even as hundreds of new actors joined, the network retained its fundamental property: any institution could reach nearly any other through just one or two intermediaries. That structural resilience, the study suggests, is precisely what workshops are designed to produce.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns who was showing up. Scientific institutions participated in all 42 workshops and accounted for roughly two-thirds of attendees on average, but their relative share declined significantly over time. Meanwhile, the relative participation of business institutions increased significantly, a trend confirmed by quasibinomial regression analysis with Holm-adjusted statistical testing. This shift toward broader stakeholder inclusion, the author argues, reflects a move toward more integrative and participatory knowledge exchange processes, quantitatively supporting earlier hypotheses about the growing transdisciplinarity of biodiversity research in Germany.

The network analysis also revealed a clear core-periphery structure. At the center sat the two NeFo host institutions, the Museum for Natural History Berlin and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, along with the German IPBES Coordination Office, the Technical University Berlin, and the German environmental ministry. These institutions occupied positions of high betweenness centrality, meaning they frequently sat on the shortest paths between otherwise disconnected actors. In network theory, such brokers are critical: they control information flow, bridge structural holes, and enable collective action across community boundaries. Nineteen institutions in total showed high potential to bridge different parts of the network, though the study is careful to note that these metrics identify structural opportunities for brokerage rather than evidence that knowledge was actually transferred.

Cluster analysis using the Louvain algorithm revealed five distinct communities within the 2018 network, which mapped closely onto NeFo’s project priorities. The two largest clusters corresponded to German biodiversity research and IPBES stakeholder engagement, while smaller clusters represented workshops on societal topics such as human-nature relationships and the Sustainable Development Goals. Workshops addressing emerging topics like animal movement ecology, citizen science data quality, and agrobiodiversity under climate change showed the highest edge betweenness, indicating they served as structural bridges connecting different parts of the network.

The study is transparent about its limitations. Co-participation in a workshop does not necessarily mean that two institutions exchanged knowledge, collaborated on research, or influenced policy. The links represent opportunities for interaction rather than documented relationships, and the cumulative nature of the network means that some structural changes may simply reflect growth rather than genuine transformation. The author acknowledges that broader contextual developments, including the establishment of IPBES, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and increased funding for transdisciplinary initiatives, likely contributed to the network’s expansion alongside NeFo’s own activities.

Despite these caveats, the findings carry significant practical implications for anyone designing science-policy engagement activities. The study derives three key lessons from the NeFo experience. First, workshops on emerging topics tend to attract more diverse participants than those on well-established themes. Second, strategic collaboration and co-organization with partners from other sectors can broaden interest and integrate otherwise isolated actors. Third, follow-up activities such as joint publications can extend discussions beyond individual events and foster genuine knowledge co-production. These principles, the author suggests, apply broadly to boundary organizations seeking to connect actors across disciplines, sectors, and governance levels.

As biodiversity loss continues to accelerate globally, the need for effective science-policy interfaces has never been more urgent. The NeFo case demonstrates that national initiatives can create repeated, structured opportunities for institutions to connect, and that even modestly funded workshop programs can generate lasting network infrastructure. Yet the study also highlights a persistent vulnerability: without sustained institutional support, boundary organizations remain dependent on short-term project funding, and no single institution is both able and willing to shoulder the full cost of convening diverse stakeholders. As the author concludes, establishing a trustworthy biodiversity competence network requires exactly the kind of sustained, cross-sectoral commitment that workshops, at their best, are designed to enable.

Subject of Research: Social network analysis of workshops as a boundary-spanning tool in biodiversity science-policy interfaces

Article Title: Workshops as a boundary-spanning tool: the case of the Network-Forum on Biodiversity Research Germany

Article References: Geschke, J. (2026). Workshops as a boundary-spanning tool: the case of the Network-Forum on Biodiversity Research Germany. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 14, Article 1930490. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1930490

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1930490

Keywords: biodiversity, science-policy interface, social network analysis, workshops, IPBES, boundary organizations, knowledge exchange, NeFo, network analysis, stakeholder engagement, transdisciplinarity, environmental governance