Abstract
In recent years, the ecosystem services (ES) concept has become a major paradigm for natural resource management. While policy-makers demand hard monetary evidence that nature conservation would be worth investing in, ongoing attempts are being made to formalize the concept as a scientifically robust one size fits all analytical framework. These attempts have highlighted several major limitations of the ES concept. First, to date, the concept has paid little attention to the role of humans in the production of ES. Second, the ongoing formalization of the ES concept is turning it into a technology of globalization, thereby increasingly ignoring the socio-cultural context and history within which ecosystems emerge. Third, economic valuation has been shown to limit local stakeholders in expressing their daily and immediate ways of interacting with their environment over and beyond extrinsic motivation provided by financial gains. We address these three limitations by analyzing a social evaluation of the roles of peri-urban farmland from a territorial perspective. Our case study is the Thau lagoon in southern France. We conducted in-depth interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and ran two participatory workshops. Using a territorial meta-model that distinguishes three levels-physical, logical, and existential-stakeholder data were analyzed to unravel the interplay of territorial elements at these three levels that gives rise to ES in two broad categories: food production and aesthetic landscape. The coupling of ES and territory concepts opens up several novel analytical perspectives. It allows partitioning of ES in a manner that re-contextualizes them and gives insight about both their physical constituents and their meaning at the territorial level. Additional research should incorporate the dynamics of service demand and supply, and further investigate options for implementation.
Highlights
The ecosystem services (ES) concept (Costanza et al 1997, Daily 1997), building on a long tradition of earlier work on human– environment interactions (Westman 1977, Ehrlich and Mooney 1983, De Groot 1992), was first established as an “eye opening metaphor” (Norgaard 2010:1219), which illustrated the dependence of human societies on the natural environment
The ES concept is widely promoted as a way to identify and localize, through mapping, the values stakeholders attribute to natural ecosystems (Fagerholm and Käyhkö 2009, Raymond et al 2009, Bryan et al 2010, Casado-Arzuaga et al 2013)
The first step is localizing it through the identification, at the local scale, of the physical elements attached to it
Summary
The ecosystem services (ES) concept (Costanza et al 1997, Daily 1997), building on a long tradition of earlier work on human– environment interactions (Westman 1977, Ehrlich and Mooney 1983, De Groot 1992), was first established as an “eye opening metaphor” (Norgaard 2010:1219), which illustrated the dependence of human societies on the natural environment This metaphor has been subjected to growing formalization through well-established economic valuation and assessment methodologies (De Groot et al 2002). Economic valuation of ES based on standard rational choice theory overlooks the question of the immediate relationship between people and their environment: the diverse ways stakeholders make sense of, and give meaning to, their direct environments are reduced to a mere single currency (Challenge 3)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call