Abstract
In building a sustainable society, numerous ecosystem services have shown to play important roles for the benefit of urban residents. The distinct concept of Urban Ecosystem Services (UES) to accentuate and enhance the value of urban ecosystems has been proposed, primarily in research, with implementation in practice still at an early stage. This study examined challenges to future implementation of the UES concept in municipal planning and management of urban green spaces. Based on interviews in six Swedish municipalities, we identified four overall discourses challenging implementation of UES in municipal practice. These included (i) a need to prioritize UES in municipal planning in order to address the contemporary challenges of e.g., urbanization and biodiversity loss. This in turn creates (ii) a need for increased holistic thinking within the municipal organization, based on (iii) further documentation and standards, which should help (iv) initiate organizational transition and cross-sectorial approaches. These discourses provide interrelated challenges that could also act as opportunities for scientists and practitioners collaborations to advance integration of UES into planning and management, thereby increasing the sustainability of urban environments. This work provides a starting point for introduction of the UES concept into municipal planning.
Highlights
At international level, ecosystem services (ES) have become a central framework for interpreting social-ecological practices and interrelations
For knowledge to be integrated among planners and managers, we found that they need actual data on values and impacts of Urban Ecosystem Services (UES) to enable comparisons with other professional priorities
We found that the ES approach, UES in particular, is welcomed in municipal practice, but faces severe governance-related challenges as there is a need for more integrated urban planning and management, breakdown of silos, and integration of different departments to implement UES in urban green space planning and management
Summary
Ecosystem services (ES) have become a central framework for interpreting social-ecological practices and interrelations. Swedish national and local authorities have since pursued further integration of the ES concept, issuing various handbooks and guidelines for providing UES (e.g., C/O City 2017; Boverket 2019). These publications were a first step to implementing UES into Swedish municipal practice (Svännel et al 2019). The remainder of this paper comprises five main sections: (2) background on UES integration into planning and management practices in general, and Sweden in particular; (3) theoretical framing, introducing the policy arrangement model that informed our analysis of governance challenges; (4) methods section, describing the qualitative study approach based on interviews and the policy arrangement model; (5) results section, presenting the perceived challenges; (6) discussion, relating the results to other findings on challenges to introducing UES into municipal planning and management
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