Creating restoration landscapes: partnerships in large-scale conservation in the UK

It is increasingly recognized that ecological restoration demands conservation action beyond the borders of existing protected areas. This requires the coordination of land uses and management over a larger area, usually with a range of partners, which presents novel institutional challenges for conservation planners. Interviews were undertaken with managers of a purposive sample of large-scale conservation areas in the UK. Interviews were open-ended and analyzed using standard qualitative methods. Results show a wide variety of organizations are involved in large-scale conservation projects, and that partnerships take time to create and demand resilience in the face of different organizational practices, staff turnover, and short-term funding. Successful partnerships with local communities depend on the establishment of trust and the availability of external funds to support conservation land uses. We conclude that there is no single institutional model for large-scale conservation: success depends on finding institutional strategies that secure long-term conservation outcomes, and ensure that conservation gains are not reversed when funding runs out, private owners change priorities, or land changes hands.

Using social network analysis to identify key stakeholders in agricultural biodiversity governance and related land-use decisions at regional and local level

In 2013 the European Commission launched its new green infrastructure strategy to make another attempt to stop and possibly reverse the loss of biodiversity until 2020, by connecting habitats in the wider landscape. This means that conservation would go beyond current practices to include landscapes that are dominated by conventional agriculture, where biodiversity conservation plays a minor role at best. The green infrastructure strategy aims at bottom-up rather than top-down implementation, and suggests including local and regional stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to know which stakeholders influence land-use decisions concerning green infrastructure at the local and regional level. The research presented in this paper served to select stakeholders in preparation for a participatory scenario development process to analyze consequences of different implementation options of the European green infrastructure strategy. We used a mix of qualitative and quantitative social network analysis (SNA) methods to combine actors’ attributes, especially concerning their perceived influence, with structural and relational measures. Further, our analysis provides information on institutional backgrounds and governance settings for green infrastructure and agricultural policy. The investigation started with key informant interviews at the regional level in administrative units responsible for relevant policies and procedures such as regional planners, representatives of federal ministries, and continued at the local level with farmers and other members of the community. The analysis revealed the importance of information flows and regulations but also of social pressure, considerably influencing biodiversity governance with respect to green infrastructure and biodiversity.

Mapping social values of ecosystem services: What is behind the map?

A growing interest in mapping the social value of ecosystem services (ES) is not yet methodologically aligned with what is actually being mapped. We critically examine aspects of the social value mapping process that might influence map outcomes and limit their practical use in decision making. We rely on an empirical case of participatory mapping, for a single ES (recreation opportunities), which involves diverse stakeholders such as planners, researchers, and community representatives. Value elicitation relied on an individual open-ended interview and a mapping exercise. Interpretation of the narratives and GIS calculations of proximity, centrality, and dispersion helped in exploring the factors driving participants’ answers. Narratives reveal diverse value types. Whereas planners highlighted utilitarian and aesthetic values, the answers from researchers revealed naturalistic values as well. In turn community representatives acknowledged symbolic values. When remitted to the map, these values were constrained to statements toward a much narrower set of features of the physical (e.g., volcanoes) and built landscape (e.g., roads). The results suggest that mapping, as an instrumental approach toward social valuation, may capture only a subset of relevant assigned values. This outcome is the interplay between participants’ characteristics, including their acquaintance with the territory and their ability with maps, and the mapping procedure itself, including the proxies used to represent the ES and the value typology chosen, the elicitation question, the cartographic features displayed on the base map, and the spatial scale.