Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
management; nested arrangements of institutions, organizations, and ecological
scales; or novel institutional redesign toward “common property” resource manage-
ment approaches (Berkes and Folke 2000; Armitage et al. 2009).
The relevance of the science-policy dialogue to human communities is important
(Gobster and Hull 2000). To develop effective interaction between science and pol-
icy, the scientific information provided must be salient, credible, and considered le-
gitimate by stakeholders (Shannon 1998; Cash et al. 2003). Circumstances facilitat-
ing civic engagement, interactions building trust and empowering collaboration,
return to the importance of community identity with a place. Empowerment, espe-
cially at local community levels, includes equity of distribution, decentralized to ap-
propriate levels of information, knowledge systems, decisions, risks, and benefits (see
chaps. 5, 7, 13, 17, this volume). Local economies, rural towns and communities,
land use, and ecosystem health are emergent properties of social-ecological systems
interactions that, to resident stakeholders, define a place—local people having a col-
lective identity with a definable territory (see chap. 6, this volume). To understand a
regional landscape context for institutional design integrating decentralized empow-
erment at appropriate levels for resource and environmental governance, three basic
conditions are considered important (Cheng, Kruger, and Daniels 2003; Parisi et al.
2004; Brunckhorst et al. 2008). First, the combination of biophysical features of the
landscape spatial context must possess a relatively high level of homogeneity (often re-
flected, for example, in similar vegetation community composition). Second, the re-
gional boundaries maximize the area that residents consider important for civic en-
gagement and reflect their local to regional communities of interest. The third
condition is a nested, multiscaling capacity for dealing with externalities of resource
use by optimizing decision making at the lowest levels for which decisions can be im-
plemented and accounted for. These principles have been applied to the definition of
nested spatial frameworks for natural resource management, planning, and govern-
ment administration that would provide appropriate ecological and institutional ge-
ographies—nesting local to regional contexts—for cross-jurisdictional integration of
policies and programs (McGinnis 1999; Cash et al. 2003; Brunckhorst, Coop, and
Reeve 2006; Marshall 2008). The approach has wider applications at different in-
stitutional levels and geographic scales, for example, for understanding the social-
ecological geographies of the European Union (EU), to provide insights into region-
alism, and spatial and institutional design options for resource governance across EU
international jurisdictions (Brunckhorst et al. 2008).
At finer levels of local management, redesign of institutions and interactions
across various types of land tenure boundaries can also create incentives for cross-
jurisdictional collaboration (see chap. 12, this volume). Cross-property resource man-
agement of private and public land or resource tenure, such as within and across farm
holdings, conservation reserves and other public land, need a clear understanding of
incentives, benefits, and responsibilities (Ostrom et al. 2002). These must be devel-
oped on top of an understanding of the ecological landscape linkages, characteristics
of place attachment, and trust and reciprocity among the community of owners and
managers (Plummer and Armitage 2007). Some learning laboratory experiences are
