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In this paper, we present an alternative governance system for managing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Focusing primarily on the European Union (EU), we start with the premise that there is a need to rethink biodiversity governance to bring together land managers for collaboration and to close mismatches between levels of governance and ecological scales. We therefore create four archetypal governance scenarios that represent hypothetical extremes in two variables. The first variable is the scale of governance and differentiates between a primary focus on administrative units (e.g., country, state, and county) versus ecological scales (bioregion and landscape). The second variable is the degree of decentralization and devolution and differentiates between a top-down, central-state system, versus a bottom-up, broad actor-network system. On the basis of their considered strengths and weaknesses, we present a hybrid scenario as our proposed alternative governance system. This system brings together decision makers, land managers, and a broader range of stakeholders at a landscape scale to plan biodiversity goals and actions. This, in turn, will more closely match the biophysical conditions for effective biodiversity conservation than existing EU approaches, without overly increasing the administrative burden.

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In light of the global challenges of the Anthropocene, including biodiversity loss, there are increasing calls for positive, inspirational futures to motivate action and help steer away from current, largely unsustainable trajectories. The three horizons framework is an approach in future studies that engages with normative futures and helps develop pathways towards them. However, this approach has not been applied to explore opportunities for biodiversity conservation with farming communities. We developed a template to apply the three horizons framework in combination with storytelling to explore positive futures for agricultural landscapes with rich biodiversity. We then applied this method over two workshops with a rural community in a farming landscape of south-eastern Australia facing typical contemporary challenges of an ageing population, climate change, biodiversity loss and global market uncertainty. In the workshops, six pathways for change were developed. We unpack these narratives of change to contrast problem framings, future aspirations and mechanisms of change and discuss implications for conservation. We discuss our approach to integrating diverse perspectives and values, creating actionable knowledge and highlight the role of governance and policy to support individual and collective agency. We conclude that the three horizons approach has the potential to create actionable knowledge through locally meaningful narratives of change, and thus influence priorities and empower local action. For lasting on-ground change, leadership and effective cross-scale governance is required.