Social equity in governance of ecosystem services: synthesis from European treeline areas

Abstract

Achieving social equity among local stakeholders should be a key objective for ecosystem service (ES) governance in Europe's ecologically fragile treeline areas. The ES literature tends to be biased towards distributional equity and market-based instruments when assessing social equity of ES governance. In this study, we analyze a wide range of social equity procedures that have been applied in Europe, using 11 synthesized case studies of governance-related challenges and 75 proposals for governance enhancement from 8 European countries provided by researchers with expertise on treeline area governance. The proposals were grouped by inductive clustering into 10 procedural or distributional equity-related policy recommendations: (1) increase stakeholder collaboration, (2) balance interactions between horizontal and vertical governance levels, (3) increase ES education, (4) use science to guide decisions, (5) start collaboration at an early stage, (6) enhance transparency, (7) aim to mitigate negative impacts, (8) use an ES approach to identify synergistic goals for governance, (9) enhance balanced multi-functional land use, and (10) use market-based instruments to balance benefits and costs deriving from governance decisions. Finally, we discuss 5 more general proposals on how regulatory and market-based ap proa ches could be linked to enhance both procedural and distributional equity of treeline area governance.

Human-environment dynamics in European treeline ecosystems: a synthesis based on the DPSIR framework

“…Eleven descriptions of successful and failed practices were received, identifying 75 proposals for enhanced governance. These proposals were inductively clustered into several groups (Sarkki et al 2015(Sarkki et al , 2017b.…”

“…Table 1. Case study areas used for the assessment of human−environment dynamics in European treeline areas (adapted from Kyriazopoulos et al 2014, Sarkki et al 2015, 2016a, 2017b. ES: ecosystem services; DPSIR: drivers-pressures-state-impactsresponses framework, NP: National Park…”

“…Governance and political instruments specifically designed for treeline ecosystem restoration or adaptation to changes were not common either. Detailed case study descriptions on best management practices highlighted various methods for land-use planning (Sarkki et al 2015(Sarkki et al , 2017b. Many of the European treeline areas include protected areas.…”

Enhancing the resilience capacity of sensitive mountain forest ecosystems under environmental change (SENSFOR)

“…Working out policy recommendations for best management practises in these areas, including eco-sociological examinations of the synergies and trade-offs between different ES beneficiaries. Proposing ways to enhance governance at various institutional levels from the EU level to decision making at a local level (Sarkki et al 2017c).…”

Values held by Swedish primary school students towards forest ecosystems and the relevance for a nature’s contributions to people approach

“…This discussion includes also an exploration of which factors mediate value perception in the case of relational values to give greater clarity to the characteristics of the relationships that form between young people and FESS. The focus on a younger demographic is a step towards strengthening intergenerational equity within ecosystem valuation (Stern, 2008;Frew et al 2017) by giving a voice to the particular experience of an under-voiced section of society (Sarkki et al 2017). The consideration of this intergenerational context takes further importance from the need for long-sighted policy interfaces between forests and society given the extended temporal nature of forest management due to long rotation times.…”