The role of curation in botanic gardens: platforms for environmental and social transition

Botanic gardens collect, care for, distribute and display living organisms, preserved plant specimens, and their derived artifacts. As cultural collections, they are used for research, conservation, education and cultivated as living collections that provide tangible and intangible amenity. Curation is an integral consideration of this melee, which informs the content and confers value, through framing the public presentation and interpretation to further the mission of the host organisation. 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 origin while exploring the epistemic function of the curator’s role. Looking to provide insight into how these collections can better be directed towards the prescient externalities that result from an imbalance of the human social and wider ecological system. The framework of a Sustainable Development 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 continuing biodiversity loss. Finally, the concept of a Just Transition is identified to inform policy and direct practice from a bottom up and top-down process, to ensure equality for all stakeholders independent of their economic means or collection interests. An approach that could bring benefits for species conservation while providing a new lens for botanic garden research and curatorial practices. These include acknowledging the benefits of Indigenous and western knowledge systems and making intrinsic values work; integrating intrinsic values of the more-than-human. 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.