PLANTRANSNET (Planetary Transformation Networks): Open Governance and Stewardship Data Repository

PLANTRANSNET (Planetary Transformation Network) is an open, living research infrastructure designed to analyze how the global commitments of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework are translated, contested, and operationalized as they travel into national, regional, and local action. Rather than treating policy tracking as a neutral administrative exercise, this project evaluates governance and stewardship data as empirical evidence of the political-economic, institutional, and epistemic processes that dictate whether environmental actions achieve genuine transformation or perpetuate business-as-usual structures. The initiative deliberately bridges critical environmental policy inquiry with computational methods, advancing a distinctive analytical approach that reads large-scale governance text both for its overt content and for the underlying power relations, knowledge hierarchies, and structural patterns embedded within it. To build a rigorous, openly reusable empirical foundation, the repository assembles structured, multi-source data that connects high-level commitments with actual ground-level implementation and experience. Its flagship anchor and point of departure is a curated corpus of 3,417 national biodiversity targets and 718 pledges submitted by 1,086 state, sub-national, private, and civil-society actors under the Convention on Biological Diversity. The project expands from this core along two complementary vectors, achieving breadth by using text-as-data pipelines and natural language processing to harvest and harmonize heterogeneous open documents across global reporting streams, while achieving depth by integrating primary empirical data generated with field collaborators. This localized data includes surveys, policy-process tracing, and stakeholder workshops heavily anchored in regional partnerships across East Africa and Southeast Asia, including civil society engagement processes like the CSO Forum on Social Forestry. Conceptually and methodologically, PLANTRANSNET extends the structural insights of ecological network analysis to environmental sociology by reconstructing "governance webs." Just as ecologists map trophic interactions and habitat connectivity to assess ecosystem resilience, this repository documents and visualizes the relational ties, policy flows, and power dynamics linking state authorities, civil society organizations, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, businesses, investors, and local stewardship sites. Making these networks visible allows researchers to analyze structural centrality, identify where coordination gaps emerge, and track how resources and responsibility flow across scales. Crucially, this relational data architecture is explicitly designed to enable integrated social-ecological network analysis, allowing governance data to be overlaid directly onto spatial, biophysical, and ecological models to pinpoint critical scale mismatches where the functional boundaries of ecosystems diverge from the jurisdictions, power structures, or decision-making timelines of environmental institutions. Operating as a FAIR-compliant, collaborative platform, the repository ensures long-term significance by delivering reproducible analytical workflows in R and R Markdown alongside versioned data releases archived with persistent DOIs via Zenodo. The expected outcomes of the project include a curated, cumulative archive of global biodiversity governance data and transferable computational templates combining natural language processing with social network analysis. Furthermore, the repository will deliver a robust empirical baseline detailing the specific political, institutional, and livelihood conditions under which stewardship mechanisms, such as Payments for Ecosystem Services, biodiversity offsets, and community-based arrangements, successfully embed or fail. Ultimately, by making governance and stewardship data highly findable and reusable, PLANTRANSNET aims to provide actionable evidence for the science–policy–society interface, supporting the whole-of-society approach required by global frameworks while subjecting the knowledge systems behind proposed solutions to rigorous empirical scrutiny.