Strengthening Landscape Ecology’s Contribution to a Sustainable Environment - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 24

￿ Identify all relevant stakeholders (P)
￿ Articulate landscape sustainability problems and interactions with landscape
structure and change (All)
￿ Contextualise relevant ecological, social and economic processes (All)
￿ Identify desired directions/problems for landscape change (All)

1. Identify and contextualise
the full complexity of the
problem

True
stakeholder
participation
should occur
throughout
the process,
involving
landholders,
community
groups,
industry
groups,
indigenous
interests,
resource
managers,
landscape
ecologists,
restoration
ecologists,
social and
economic
scientists,
planners, and
policymakers

￿ Help set management objectives, recognising that the ecological system is one
part of the larger system and economic and social constraints exist (All)
￿ Inform objective setting based ecological processes and core design
principles (LE)

2. Set agreed objectives and
management actions

￿ Collaborate to assemble and analyse data relevant to the agreed management
objectives (All)
￿ Predict the future states of the landscape system for alternative management
actions (LE)

3. Conduct data analysis
and integration

4. Understand risks and
uncertainties

￿ Quantify level of uncertainty in the decision making variables (LE, P)
￿ Identify risks of adverse outcomes occurring (LE, P)

5. Analyse and decide on
solution

￿ Jointly evaluate the outcomes of a set of possible management actions (All)

6. Implement landscape
management actions

￿ Help implement the preferred landscape management actions (All)
￿ Commit to long-term involvement in solving the problem (All)

￿ Design and apply long-term monitoring to understanding landscape

ecological, social, economic and physical responses to management actions (All)
￿ Adapt management actions in response to new understanding from monitoring
(All)

-scale

7. Monitoring and adaptive
management

Fig. 2.1 A conceptual framework for strengthening landscape ecology's contribution to a
sustainable environment. The framework is divided into seven stages of the problem-solving
process. The key contributions of landscape ecologists (LE), planners (P) and all stakeholders
(All) to each stage are highlighted (Modified from McAlpine et al. 2010 )

incorporating stakeholder participation and institutional design considerations
throughout the analytic process (Morrison 2006 ). There is evidence that explicitly
considering the socio-institutional context compels landscape scientists and man-
agers to think about design and implementation. This evidence comes from collab-
orative environmental planning and common property resource management, where
it has resulted in established principles for considering stakeholder participation and
institutional design factors in implementation research (Sabatier 1986 ; Ostrom 1990 ;
Lane and McDonald 2005 ; Heikkila et al. 2011 ; Schmidt and Morrison 2012 ).
The seven stages of the framework are outlined below.
Stage 1: Identify and conceptualise the problem. The first stage is to identify
and conceptualise the problem. Precisely defining the problem is often the most
difficult but important step in the problem-solving process (Possingham and
Nicholson 2007 ), partly because problem identification is a complex social con-
struct, involving the aspirations of, and constraints on, the various stakeholder
groups which, by necessity, brings together the social, economic and ecological
sciences (Bartuska 1999 ). In most cases, the 'problem' will actually comprise a set
of related problems, which represent the perspectives and interests of different
stakeholders in a given landscape. Stakeholder participation starts at this early
stage (Friedmann 1987 ). The involvement of these different parties during the