Abstract
ABSTRACT There has been a widespread push to incorporate ecosystem services (ES) in research and policy-making, yet ES have remained an expert-driven discourse not well integrated into hands-on planning and management, particularly at the more local levels. We carry out a retrospective investigation of an inter-municipal marine spatial planning (MSP) process in Northern Norway, where the allocation of new aquaculture locations was a core issue. At this local/regional scale, the concept of ES is hardly known. Thus, our approach is to investigate the documents of public consultation, where different stakeholders operating at different scales respond to the proposed planning document. By analyzing and ‘translating’ the consultation statements into the ES nomenclature, we find a rich and diverse basis for ES identification especially at the local level and within cultural and supporting services. More than 208 different ecosystem services were identified, two-thirds of the total number of services at the local scale. This supports the debate in the ES-science community, which has suggested greater inclusion of plural and context-specific perspectives on people’s relationship to the environment. Our findings show that by doing so in MSP, municipal coastal planners may obtain tools that strengthen local democracy and include greater ES diversity and sustainability.
Highlights
Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005) there has been an increasing interest in how ecosystem services (ES) may inform political decision-making in the management of natural resources
The analysis shows the prevalence of supporting and cultural services identified, on the local scale, and thereby highlighting services often not included in marine spatial planning (MSP), where provisioning services largely dominate
We find a large degree of bundling across services, where consultation statements especially focused on fisheries, both within a service type and across services, despite fishers largely not being present amongst the stakeholders submitting statements
Summary
Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005) there has been an increasing interest in how ecosystem services (ES) may inform political decision-making in the management of natural resources. The International Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has attempted to attend to some of these objections, for instance by suggesting the replacement of the ‘ecosystem service’ concept with ‘nature’s contribution to people’ (Díaz et al 2018), creating more distance to the often market dominated perceptions of what services include. Aware of these developments, we apply the MA (2005) ‘ecosystem service’ concept in our analysis, we incorporate the IPBES emphasis on indigenous and local knowledge in order to open up for a more ‘grounded’ and diverse perspective on nature and environment (Díaz et al 2015; Pascual et al 2017). We find that such services are highly relevant in our study, and the newer frameworks (TEEB 2010; CICES 2013; IPBES 2017) have largely excluded these services, presumably due to the
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