Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
source access, resource use, and distribution of benefits; minimizing detrimental ef-
fects on other resource users and the environment; and conserving ecosystems and
their services. Political, policy, and property institutions are also likely to contain some
key solutions and directions for ecological restoration and environmental stewardship.
Such novel remedies or adaptive capacities will emerge from social-ecological inter-
actions with the 3Ps.
Evolving arrangements of property and tenure concepts and land and resource use
policies are major influences on ecological change at multiple landscape scales. In or-
der to build more resilient and sustainable social-ecological systems, one major chal-
lenge is to raise the focus and quality of holistically integrated policy development.
This will involve the planning and management of human interactions with the envi-
ronment from local to regional landscape scales, and across institutionally embedded
property rights and departmentally narrow policies of government agencies (Gunder-
son, Holling, and Light 1995; Johnson et al. 1999; Brunckhorst 2000). Many efforts to
focus at broader scales of ecological management have been less than effective be-
cause of a narrow focus of science and policy, blockages in communication, and a lack
of cohesive integration at appropriate scales and context of social-ecological systems
interactions. For example, a multitude of government regulations implemented by
many nations have achieved little in protecting soils, water quality, ecosystems, and
species on private land. Similarly, public land-based conservation (e.g., national
parks, state parks) is often compromised by geography (scale, context, connectivity)
and negative environmental externalities from adjoining tenures (i.e., cross-boundary
influences; Schonewald-Cox et al. 1992; Agrawal and Ostrom 2006; Brunckhorst
2010). Likewise, ecological restoration initiatives usually operate in the same institu-
tional milieu of policy and organizational issues, linear control efforts, and disengage-
ment from key players. For example, watershed management approaches, while rep-
resenting downstream effects, often do not represent the context of soils, vegetation,
land uses, and human communities at a local level that are important in restoration
actions (see chap. 6, this volume). Such conservation and restoration actions might
need to be scaled up across the landscape, not using the watershed boundaries, but by
“nesting” broader scales of collective community and ecological representation rele-
vant to the task (Brunckhorst 2010).
Working across the dimensions of the 3Ps might offer insights helpful in under-
standing lessons from ecological restoration models and in designing collective action
for collaborative or comanagement institutions for future success. Efforts to increase
the scale and effectiveness of ecological sustainability might need to focus more on in-
novative institutional arrangements that enhance cross-boundary, cross-jurisdictional
collective action. A landscape systems view of the 3Ps is offered as an interdisciplinary
meld that is important, but sometimes forgotten (or avoided) in attempts to develop
more integrative, cross-scale ecological restoration and management. A landscape
ecology view provides for planning integration of restoration efforts across the 3Ps
(e.g., across different land or resource tenures that otherwise interrupt or fragment
restoration efforts). Systems theory and landscape ecology can contribute novel,
practical approaches to cross-jurisdictional ecological management and restoration.
