Using Ecosystem Services in Community-Based Landscape Planning: Science is Not Ready to Deliver - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 80

for the environmental and economic sciences; it is often expert-led and does not
take into account the variety of resource user perspectives. The social science
approach is based on bottom-up, context-specific participatory approaches. Typ-
ical for the physical system approach are lists of specific, technical criteria. For
example, for agricultural systems, Ghersa et al. ( 2002 ) proposed 14 farm-level
criteria (including farm and field size, incidence of drought, agrochemical effi-
ciency, tillage efficiency, crop yield variation coefficient) and 3 landscape-level
criteria (e.g. frequency of field size classes), all of which are quite technical and
have no relevance for non-food services. Other similar examples can be found in
Sheppard and Meitner ( 2005 ) for forestry landscapes (9 criteria) and in George
( 1999 ) for environmental assessment (18 criteria). Within the landscape planning
literature, Leitão and Ahern ( 2002 ) discussed a range of technical metrics for
landscape pattern, emphasizing the need to link pattern and process across scales
as a sustainability criterion, but without considering the social and economic
aspects of sustainability. I concur with the conclusion of Robert et al. ( 1997 ) that
''one-dimensional physical measures'' do not account for the interdependency of
the physical and societal components of sustainable landscape change. In partic-
ipatory planning, long lists of criteria are off-putting rather than inviting. By
contrast, the social sciences literature considers sustainability as the emergent
property of human interaction, not to be captured in unambiguous generalizable
criteria (Röling 2004 ). Sustainability becomes translated into concrete social
practice by a joint effort of all relevant actors. Issues such as social learning,
cooperation and equal distribution of costs and benefits are therefore core themes
in social science literature on sustainability. The functioning of the physical sys-
tem and its relation to long-term profits to humans is rarely considered.
An important debate between proponents of the physical and social systems
approaches is whether there are tipping points in landscape change, beyond which
the landscape no longer functions properly. In clarifying this debate, Farrell and
Hart ( 1998 ) distinguished two competing conceptions on how social, environ-
mental, and economic values should be balanced. The Critical Limits View fol-
lows a positivistic point of view by proposing objective generic limits of
acceptable change. It assumes that the Earth's environmental carrying capacity and
resource limitations impose limits to its use. Related to this view is the concept of
strong sustainability, which assumes the maintenance of ecological capital (Antrop
2006 ; Dietz and Neumayer 2007 ). Alternatively, the Competing Objectives View
of sustainability assumes that social, economic, and ecological goals are balanced
in the context of a broad range of human needs. Related to this view is the concept
of weak sustainability, which promotes the idea that the natural capital of an area
can be substituted by other forms of capital (Dietz and Neumayer 2007 ; Antrop
2006 ). Farrell and Hart ( 1998 ) noted that the idea of resource limits is entirely
absent from the competing objectives view.
To create a common ground for sustainable landscape planning, these two
opposing approaches have to be converged. For example, with respect to the issue
of thresholds, Termorshuizen and Opdam ( 2009 ) have pointed out that because
relations between the landscape pattern and landscape functioning are often