Human perceptions of nature and the environment are increasingly being recognised as important for environmental management and conservation. Understanding people's perceptions is crucial for understanding behaviour and developing effective management strategies to maintain, preserve and improve biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. As an interdisciplinary team, we produced a synthesis of the key factors that influence people's perceptions of invasive alien species, and ordered them in a conceptual framework. In a context of considerable complexity and variation across time and space, we identified six broad-scale dimensions: (1) attributes of the individual perceiving the invasive alien species; (2) characteristics of the invasive alien species itself; (3) effects of the invasion (including negative and positive impacts, i.e. benefits and costs); (4) socio-cultural context; (5) landscape context; and (6) institutional and policy context. A number of underlying and facilitating aspects for each of these six overarching dimensions are also identified and discussed. Synthesising and understanding the main factors that influence people's perceptions is useful to guide future research, to facilitate dialogue and negotiation between actors, and to aid management and policy formulation and governance of invasive alien species. This can help to circumvent and mitigate conflicts, support prioritisation plans, improve stakeholder engagement platforms, and implement control measures.

. 2017. Who's in charge here anyway? Polycentric governance configurations and the development of policy on invasive alien species in the semisovereign Caribbean. Ecology and Society 22 (4) ABSTRACT. We address the development of policy by polycentric governance configurations, taking Caribbean overseas territories and their advancements on invasive alien species (IAS) policy as an example. The British, Dutch, and French islands in the Caribbean address this matter to different degrees, which we analyzed through differences in their type of polycentric governance configuration with their respective European counterpart. We employ a continuum ranging from predominantly polycentric to predominantly monocentric governance configurations to characterize the three case studies. Based on semistructured interviews with government actors, park managers, and NGO employees on Anguilla, Guadeloupe, and St. Eustatius, plus a literature study, we characterize St. Eustatius as highly polycentric and Guadeloupe as becoming increasingly polycentric. Anguilla cannot be considered either of the two, given the virtually absent involvement of the UK. Policy development on IAS showed most progress in Guadeloupe, whereas in Anguilla and St. Eustatius, IAS management is ad hoc. Within these cases, the hampering effect of dispute about the functioning of the configuration was clear. For Guadeloupe, increasing autonomy to decide on policy priorities within a coherent system where standards are set and ample resources made available appears conducive to policy development. That same balance inherent to polycentric systems between autonomy and coherence is hard to strike for St. Eustatius, and currently mainly perceived as a trade-off, hampering policy development. By discussing these three cases, this study illustrates how different polycentric configurations can affect policy development.

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Who worries first about an invasive alien species: scientists or the general public, or do both become concerned simultaneously? Taking thirteen invasive alien species in the Netherlands, this article reconstructs the development of their public and scientific salience: the attention they attracted and the knowledge about them. Salience was assessed from the number of publications from 1997 onwards in the LexisNexis newspaper database and Scopus scientific database. Three trajectories were derived for a species to move from being a latent problem with low salience toward a manifest status with high public and scientific salience. In the most common trajectory, scientific salience increased first, followed by an increase in public salience. We probed the merit of this concept of trajectories by examining the action undertaken for a representative species of the trajectories. We assigned each of these three species a code for inertia and inaction based on the content of a hundred newspaper articles and all available government documents. Knowing the scientific and public salience of these species clarifies why the actions to deal with them differed even though from an ecological perspective they warranted similar attention. The typology of public and scientific salience and the problem trajectories developed in this article together offer a structured approach for understanding an invasive alien species and provide pointers for engaging a community in managing that species.

Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach for fully co-creating research into environmental problems with the public. We argue this is mostly done for manifest environmental problems that clearly threaten livelihoods and have highly predictable impacts. But the conventional PAR approach is not suitable when the impacts are poorly understood and pose a low threat to livelihoods. Such latent environmental problems do not have a clear conflict to be resolved; instead, the community's inertia should be overcome. In this article, we develop what we call the PAR-L approach, for which we present a step-by-step guide and an evaluation framework. We then demonstrate this approach on the latent problem of the invasive alien Coralita vine (Antigonon leptopus) on Saba (Caribbean Netherlands) and find that it results in thorough understanding of the community inertia. Overcoming the inertia would require a project to run longer and a simultaneous knowledge-gathering effort, but PAR-L is a good starting point.