Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Ecological Restoration across Landscapes of
Politics, Policy, and Property
DAVID BRUNCKHORST
Humanity—society and its institutions—plays a key role in the future viability of the
biosphere. Only by managing ourselves, our resource consumption, our waste, our
economies and environment as a whole, can we hope to “manage” the environment
and its abundant resources toward a sustainable, healthy, and restorative future. Un-
fortunately, political reelections and the politics of environmental restoration often
seem to be at juxtapositions. The fast-moving variables of economics and reelection
generally reign supreme over their slower, foundational, and interdependent ecologi-
cal components (Carpenter and Turner 2001). The scales of time and space and the
constituency of voters generally don't line up, and, as a result, political and ecological
concerns are often misinterpreted as rivals rather than essentials.
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Similarly, planning
for the development of land and other resource use often conflicts with maintaining
ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and ecological restoration require-
ments. To make matters more confusing, the policies and programs of different gov-
ernment agencies appear to contradict each other.
In this chapter, I offer a “big picture” view of politics, policy, and property (the
“3Ps”) as they relate to ecological restoration based on a brief discussion of theory and
practice stemming from the fields of regional landscape ecology, complex systems,
and institutional design. As I see the situation, the challenges for ecological restora-
tion in the social dimension are caught up in the complexities of entwined social-
ecological systems operating across not just multiple spatial and temporal scales but
also multiple operational scales of human institutions of politics, policies, and prop-
erty.
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Despite these complexities, I believe that environmental restoration and stew-
ardship at all scales are demonstrably possible across the boundaries of politics, poli-
cies, and property rights. What is required is a better understanding of how these
socioeconomic institutions and practices work in our everyday lives.
Politics is all about the formal and informal contests and negotiations of power in, or
over, various circumstances, and how and what power or decisions might be shared or
not. The realm of politics entails the building of coalitions, the mobilization of power,
and the management of public perceptions, opinions, and actions (including voting
behavior) as means of achieving strategic objectives. Property is the institutionalized
