Abstract
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES, GOVERNANCE, AND STAKEHOLDER PARTICIPATION: AN INTRODUCTION The ecosystem services approach has gained popularity, and novel incentive-based ecosystem conservation strategies are increasingly being used. This calls for the reassessment and transformation of conceptual-theoretical, natural resource management, and governance approaches to conservation. In the past, conservation efforts focused on distinct components of ecosystems without regard for long-term human well-being. Natural resource management in turn sought to control nature to harvest products for direct consumption or for sale at markets. However, this singular focus on management ignored that ecosystems are complex, dynamic, adaptive systems with nonlinear feedback and thresholds (Costanza 2008) and are tightly interlinked with human systems (Menzel and Teng 2010).
Highlights
The ecosystem services approach acknowledges the complex interactions between the structures, processes, and services of an ecosystem across the landscape (Turner and Daily 2008, Fisher et al 2009)
Biggs et al (2012) have identified seven principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services, which focus on generic social-ecological systems properties and processes and on the way they are governed
The systems’ boundaries are not “set in stone”; they remain open to definition of who the stakeholders are in a continuum from local communities maintaining their livelihoods based on traditional resource extraction to urban consumers of services or international stakeholders
Summary
The ecosystem services approach acknowledges the complex interactions between the structures, processes, and services of an ecosystem across the landscape (Turner and Daily 2008, Fisher et al 2009). The ecosystem services approach currently informs the development of environmental accounting and performance systems (Boyd and Banzhaf 2007), economic valuation for environmental decision making, planning and policy (Balmford et al 2002, Turner et al 2003), equity in human welfare (see Wallace 2007), landscape management, adaptive governance (Folke et al 2005), and attainment of multiple conservation objectives (Fisher et al 2009).
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