Biodiversity is a phenomenon of concern for all individuals and organizations. While the importance of stakeholder collaboration in biodiversity management is well established, a thorough exploration of stakeholder theory and its possibilities in addressing biodiversity is needed. The aim of this study is to explore the current state of biodiversity research and identify how stakeholder theory could address biodiversity. For that purpose, we carry out an interpretive literature review on the extant research on biodiversity in various fields and outline how the rational, process and interaction levels of stakeholder theory appear in the literature. The findings show that biodiversity research tends to recognize and address stakeholders but mostly uses the stakeholder concept in a loose manner, without taking the basic tenets of stakeholder theory seriously. We further organize our findings using the idea of biodiversity as a wicked problem which challenges stakeholder theory and brings forth the knowledge uncertainty related to temporal and spatial aspects of biodiversity, the importance of understanding conflicting stakeholder views and values, as well as the complexity and unpredictability of biodiversity and its development.
