The Role of Curation in Botanic Gardens: Platforms for environmental and social Transition.

Botanic gardens collect, care for, distribute and display, plant specimens, and their derived artefacts. As cultural collections, they help further research, conservation, and education, while their living collections provide tangible and intangible amenity. Curation is an integral consideration of this melee, informing content and conferring value, through framing the visitor experience and progressing the host organizations mission. This paper reviews the evolution of western botanic gardens as institutions of power, inferred by knowledge. Exploring the key externalities that have informed their collection acquisitions since their renaissance origins, while exploring the epistemic function of the curators role. Looking to provide insight into how these collections transition to
the prescient externalities that result from an imbalance of the human social and wider ecological system. The Sustainable Development framework is reviewed as the dominant sustainability narrative and top down transformative solution pathway. While Nature-based Solutions are identified as potential tools to help mitigate and adapt to emerging challenges from anthropogenic
climate change and biodiversity loss. Finally, the concept of a Just Transition is identified as a means to inform policy and direct practice that seeks to ensure equality for all stakeholders independent of their economic means or collection interests. An approach that could bring benefit
for species conservation while providing a new lens for curatorial praxis. Finally, the case for botanic gardens to be considered as centres of knowledge or hortus apertus is made to acknowledge the continual evolution of these institutions, and revaluation of their role in a time of global change.