Tesseract Foundational Research: Governance & Stakeholder Mapping
The UK nature-governance landscape, as a graph you can cite
Stakeholder mapping for the environment sector is usually a slide: boxes and arrows, no provenance, out of date the day it is drawn. The relationships that matter, who sponsors whom, who advises government internationally, whose data flows into the national record, which duties are statutory, are exactly the ones a diagram cannot defend. This treats the landscape as data instead, and makes an unsourced link impossible by construction.
The direction of travel
The Environment Act 2021 reshaped who does what for nature in England: it created the Office for Environmental Protection, made Local Nature Recovery Strategies a statutory duty for 48 responsible authorities, and established mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain with a credit market run by Natural England on behalf of Defra. Any body planning stakeholder engagement, a Local Nature Recovery Strategy, a nature-market venture or an evidence partnership has to navigate this landscape correctly. Getting the relationships wrong (assuming Defra sponsors bodies it does not, or missing a statutory duty) is a real risk in a real bid or plan.
The design commitment: no unsourced edge
Every relationship in the graph is reified as its own node carrying a typed predicate (sponsors, advises, supplies-data-to, funds, partners-with, regulates, designated-under), a plain-language basis, and a prov:wasDerivedFrom link to a cited source with a resolvable URL. This is not a convention; it is enforced. The SHACL shapes fail the build if any relationship lacks a source, or any source lacks a URL. A relationship you cannot cite cannot enter the graph. The build validates at zero SHACL violations with full referential integrity.
| Class | Examples in the graph |
|---|---|
| Statutory agencies | Defra, JNCC, Natural England, NRW, NatureScot, DAERA, Environment Agency, SEPA, OEP, ESS |
| Data / evidence bodies | NBN Trust & Atlas, UKCEH, BTO, BSBI, Biological Records Centre, iRecord |
| NGOs | National Trust, RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, WWF-UK, Plantlife, Rivers Trust |
| Funders | National Lottery Heritage Fund, Esmée Fairbairn, the statutory biodiversity-credit market |
| Partnerships | Local Nature Recovery Strategies, National Park Authorities, Catchment Based Approach |
| International | CBD, Ramsar, OSPAR, IUCN and its UK National Committee |
Where the tidy answer would be wrong
The graph records the accurate relationship, not the convenient one. The Forestry Commission is a non-ministerial department in the Defra group, not a sponsored public body; the Northern Ireland Environment Agency is an executive agency inside DAERA; NatureScot, Natural Resources Wales and SEPA answer to the devolved governments, not Defra; statutory biodiversity credits are sold by Natural England on behalf of Defra under Schedule 7A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990; and Local Nature Recovery Strategy authorities are designated under Environment Act 2021 section 104. Each of those distinctions is carried in the relationship's basis and its citation, not smoothed over, because in this domain the distinction is the point.
Where this goes
The graph answers competency questions directly: which bodies Defra sponsors, who supplies data to the NBN Atlas, which relationships rest on legislation. It extends to the devolved landscapes in more depth, to funding flows, and to specific programmes. It is part of Tesseract's Open Ontologies work, and shares its method with our nature-related security-risk evidence base: model the domain as a sourced, validated graph so its claims can be queried and checked, not just drawn.
Independent, self-initiated open research built entirely from public sources, each cited per relationship. Released under CC BY 4.0; endorsed by none of the bodies named within it.
View the open graph
Ontology, SHACL shapes, the sourced graph in Turtle and JSON-LD, and competency queries.
