This is a repository copy of Ten people-centered rules for socially sustainable ecosystem restoration.

Building on the Bonn Challenge, the UN Decade advances global restoration on an unprecedented scale. Research increasingly points to the need for greater social inclusion in restoration projects, yet the approaches that favor such inclusion remain opaque in practice. In this paper, we identify three restoration approaches that figure in the international agenda and analyze these through the lens of social inclusion. We argue that: (1) restoration aimed at bringing ecosystems back to a previous state, or "return" restoration, favors natural science at the landscape scale over social inclusion at the community scale; (2) restoration seeking to recreate functional ecosystems in locations away from where the degradation has occurred, or "reorganization" restoration, fails to adequately address historical inequities and perpetuates legacies of exploitation; and (3) "resilience" oriented restoration is promising but remains theoretical, and risks instrumentalizing marginalized communities and their lands as experimental sites for restoration. Though both "return" and "reorganize" restoration face substantial criticism, these approaches continue to play a central role in the major paradigms and practices that enliven the global restoration agenda. To improve prospects for social inclusion in the global restoration movement, we advance that the movement must evolve beyond productivity-based inclusion schemes and address the role that international initiatives play in perpetuating systems of exploitation. Finally, we argue that "resilience" restoration offers the most promising pathway towards meaningful social inclusion when it can empower community members to participate in restoration as agents of change and co-experimenters.

Social-ecological restoration (SoER) embraces the nested interdependence of societies and ecosystems. An outpouring of SoER research has substantively shaped the global restoration agenda and will continue to play a critical role as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration unfolds. In this article, I argue that global restoration ambitions are limited by two competing imperatives in SoER literature. The first imperative seeks to generalize restoration standards and metrics through rapid coordination and scaling. The second imperative seeks to upend problematic power dynamics, demanding social inclusivity and site specificity at levels that tend to resist scaling. Although these imperatives do not necessarily compete in theory, they often do in practice. Relying on a synthesis of key articles and expanding on the concept of "social-ecological mismatches" (Cumming et al. 2006), I examine how the prevailing SoER research discourse creates a confounding landscape for restoration practitioners, who face what I term the "Dilemma of Scale." I explore how this dilemma perpetuates systems of global inequality and inhibits efforts to effectively animate initiatives like the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. I suggest that the Dilemma of Scale can be effectively mitigated by (1) identifying values that span both imperatives and work to decouple SoER projects from systems of exploitation and oppression and (2) expressly incorporating historical methods into SoER research and projects.

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