Ecosystem Services Linking Social and Ecological Systems: River Brownification and the Response of Downstream Stakeholders

Abstract

In this thesis I have worked with the ambition of approaching the question of how human-ecology interaction can be articulated in a way that is useful as a vector for societal transformation. The thesis addresses the difficult question of how the ecosystem service framework may help to address mismatches between social and ecological systems.e thesis contains five papers that both treats ecosystem services conceptually and make use of it as a reasearch tool in real landscapes. Paper I presents a typology of how tradeoffs between regulating and provisioning ecosystem services can be understood. Paper II uses the ecosystem service framework together with resilience thinking to identify stakeholders and analyse how they are affected by a change in ecosystem service delivery. Paper III investigates how a bridging organisation can counteract a social-ecological missmatch, and suggest how the strength of “bridging” can be measured. In paper IV a single ecosystem service is followed to understand on what scale management descision should be taken. Paper V expands upon how resilience thinking can complement an ecosystem service approach and presents a method, response strategy assessment, for estimating resilience in a social-ecological system.