Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 91

Carpenter et al. ( 2009 ) paid attention to monitoring from the point of view of the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, emphasizing assessment and large spatial
scales. Systematic monitoring at the local level, as a source of information to the
local adaptive management network, seems to be virtually absent. Apparently,
there is lot of work that needs to be done here before monitoring results can be
incorporated into a social learning process.
5.6 Perspective Sand Conclusions
I have viewed community-based landscape planning as a change process in a
social-ecological system, and discussed how the concept of landscape services
could be evolved as a boundary concept to enhance and structure communication
and negotiation about sustainable change between different interest groups having
a stake in the local landscape.
From the reviewed literature in this chapter it is obvious that the scientific state
of the art is not ready to deliver adequate tools to support community-based
landscape planning. Scientific efforts on ecosystem services have been primarily
focussed on assessments at large spatial scale, and with policy users in mind. For
application in community-based landscape planning, scientific development of
theories and tools are still in their childhood. There is a strong demand for tools
that are able to support local governance networks, where the users are citizens,
farmers, entrepreneurs and local authorities, the object of governance is the local
landscape system, and the aim is to adapt the landscape to meet the expected
demands without losing its potential to provide services in the long term. That
science tends to be focussed on the policy level and on assessment tools while
neglecting the deliberation and implementation phase of designing solutions has
been argued several time before (Opdam 2010 ) and is not specific of ecosystem
services research. However, it seems that in ecosystem service research the need
for this is not yet recognized.
A second conclusion is that ecosystem service science has not yet been able to
merge with several emerging themes relevant to sustainability science: governance
networks, multiple level governance and complex adaptive systems, and resilience
in social-ecological systems (Folke et al. 2005 ; Ernstson et al. 2008 ). There is very
little attention to multiple scale effects and implications for decision making
(Opdam 2013 ), to creating conditions that ensure long term provision of services.
A recent attempt by Burkhard et al. ( 2011 ) to link ecosystem services thinking to
resilience theory may be a good start of theory building.
The Social-Ecological model is helpful to move the ecosystem services
research out of the static mapping and evaluation approaches towards dynamic
systems thinking. It helps understanding that the valuation of landscape services is
not a static outcome of a scientific assessment, based on generic standardized
estimates of value. On the contrary, values attributed to services may be dynamic,
subject to social and political change, and variable over social-ecological space.