Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 92

Setting aims for the delivery of services by the future landscape should be the
result of place-based and context-based deliberation, negotiation and evolution,
acknowledging that 'landscape service value' means something different to
stakeholders with different interests and different views on the human-nature
relation, and living in different places of the landscape. As Potschin and Haines
Young ( 2012 ) put it: ''context matters'' in the relationship between ecosystem
patterns and service valuation. To be able to support this kind of planning process,
scientists need to understand better how interventions in the landscape structure
depend on the structure of the governance network, and develop methods based on
that insight. It also calls for a reinterpretation of classic landscape ecological
knowledge in terms of a response of the biophysical system to change (instead of
framing human intervention as undesired impacts). Therefore, by incorporating
valuation and intervention into a landscape planning cycle, the SES model makes
clear the essence of the first three principles of sustainable landscape change that
were suggested in this chapter. Moreover, the SES concept is born out of resilience
thinking and theories of adaptive governance (Dietz and Neumayer 2007 ) and
adaptive co-management (Armitage et al. 2009 ), and incorporates the need for
long term resource availability and scale-sensitive decision making.
A challenging approach to better understand these interactions is modelling
socio-ecological systems with Agent Based Models (Schlüter et al. 2012 ). This
approach allows the performance of experiments with different interdependencies
among actors, with different sets of knowledge, and with different incentives. Such
experiments can be validated with case studies and comparative analysis to feed
the outcome of case studies back into theory. The SES model can be used as a
theoretical framework for sustainable landscape change, and helps to formulate
questions about the interactions between the social and physical component of the
landscape, and on the role of scientific knowledge in shaping this interaction.
This chapter will close with suggesting research priorities, for which I use the 6
sustainability principles as a source of inspiration.
1. Understanding landscapes as Social-Ecological Systems. In a SES, the land-
scape is the physical part of the system that offers opportunities for sustainable
socio-economic development. How does this view align with the many dif-
ferent views on landscape in literature and in society (Stephenson 2008 ), and
how does it interfere with views on protecting cultural heritage? How can sense
of place become the conceptual basis for local landscape adaptation (Nassauer
2012 )? How does the SES model helps us to move from impact and threat
thinking towards opportunity thinking?
2. Mapping supply and demand of landscape services, essentially guiding the
actions of local land owners and land users to intervene in the landscape sys-
tem. Maps need to show where investments in the landscape structure are
profitable, and where the demanding stakeholders are located. Maps should go
beyond informing about current value from services, and guide cost-effective
interventions (where, how) for creating added value. It also calls for maps to