International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management
Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2012, 305–312
Ecosystem services and landscape management: three challenges and one plea
Gunhild Settena
*, Marie Stensekeb
and Jon Moenc
a
Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway; b
Department of Human and
Economic Geography, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden; c
Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Umeå
University, Umeå, Sweden
This article identifies three interrelated challenges concerning the ecosystem services (ES) framework and the nature of landscape
dynamics within the context of landscape management. These challenges are set within a problematic externalization
of nature inherent in the ES framework. The first challenge concerns the lack of compatibility between the ES framework and
the logics of landscapes. The second challenge addresses the complexity of ecosystems, unsubstitutable values, and intangible
dimensions in economic valuation when applied to landscapes. The third challenge points at how the ES framework
has problems in accounting for how and why sociocultural processes are crucial to environmental attitudes and behavior.
We argue that the idea of landscape and its inherent landscape dynamics, a crosscutting dimension of these challenges, is a
missed opportunity for the ES framework in order to take immeasurable and context-specific social and cultural processes
more seriously and consequently deliver sounder advice on landscape management. We thus make a plea for the importance
of creating platforms for dialogue across research communities working to improve the understanding of human–nature
dynamics.
Keywords: ecosystem services; landscape dynamics; landscape management; social and cultural services; nature–culture
relations
Introduction
In the early 1980s, Ehrlich and coworkers (Ehrlich and
Ehrlich 1981; Ehrlich and Mooney 1983) introduced
ecosystem services (ES) as a pedagogical tool to raise the
public awareness of the many services that ecosystems provide
to humans and in that way argue for protection of
those ecosystems. By joining forces, economists and ecologists
have established ES ‘as a way of framing conservation
imperatives to convince humans of the value of the natural
world’ (Redford and Adams 2009, p. 785). Even though
it may have been painful to those who value nature for its
intrinsic values, it has been argued that ‘the use of market
metaphors was necessary to awaken a public deeply
embedded in a global economy and distant from natural
processes’ (Norgaard 2010, p. 1219). Yet, for almost two
decades, very few took any notice of the ES framework (at
least as reflected in the very low number of papers published
on ES). This changed in 1997 when Costanza et al.
(1997) put forward the proposal that the Earth is worth
$33 trillion. Since Costanza et al.’s ‘undeniably intoxicating’
(Robertson 2012, p. 387) estimation of the Earth’s
worth, the number of research papers on ES has grown
almost exponentially. While the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005)
lacked data to continue the valuation of services, this challenge
has been taken on by the recent TEEB project (The
Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity; TEEB 2010a):
‘Ideally, TEEB will act as a catalyst to help accelerate the
development of a new economy: one in which the values of
*Corresponding author. Email: gunhild.setten@svt.ntnu.no
natural capital and the ecosystem services which this capital
supplies, are fully reflected in the mainstream of public
and private decision-making’ (TEEB 2010b, p. 3). This
commodification, and on the whole neo-liberalization of
nature, coupled with arguments for nature conservation, is
thus made possible by a narrow and simplistic understanding
of value disconnected from the complexities of the
social world (cf. Chan et al. 2012; Dempsey and Robertson
in press).
Awareness-raising and boosting arguments for the
value of ES for nature conservation is hence not to be
confused with developing strategies for sustainable management
of biotic qualities. The emergence of ecosystem
management as a means of obtaining a sustainable use of
natural resources has highlighted the importance of ecological
processes and governance at larger scales than individual
management units (e.g., a single farm or forest stand;
de Groot et al. 2010; Kenward et al. 2011). Crucially, this is
not only a call for broadening the scalar complexity of governing
ecological processes. It is equally a call to approach
ecosystems generally, and ES more specifically, beyond the
economic framework so characteristic of the majority of
ES research (Chan et al. 2012). The political ‘appetite for
economic decision-making frameworks’ (Chan et al. 2012,
p. 16) is thus increasingly questioned, and the field of ES
is becoming somewhat of a political and academic battlefield
(e.g., Chan et al. 2012; Robertson 2012, Dempsey and
Robertson in press). Fish (2011) holds that the implications
of embracing ES within ‘environmental decision-making
ISSN 2151-3732 print/ISSN 2151-3740 online
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306 G. Setten et al.
are little understood (cf. also Chan et al. 2012). Many ecologists
criticize the ES concept in that the current obsession
with end products (‘services’) ignores the species and processes
that actually produce those end products (see, e.g.,
Peterson et al. 2009). This has resulted in attempts to incorporate
species and functional traits in relation to services
produced (e.g., de Bello et al. 2010; Lavorel et al. 2011).
However, it is unclear how well this can be integrated into
current valuation schemes.
This article is a direct response to much of the recent
questioning of the ES framework. We come from the disciplines
of ecology and human geography, respectively, and
are joined by an interest in landscape dynamics, a concern
central to both disciplines. A basic premise for our arguments
in this article is that landscapes, landscape dynamics,
and ecosystems are closely related. Landscapes are,
both physically and symbolically, made through nature–
culture relations. Consequently, any understanding of landscapes
must draw on cross-disciplinary as well as crosssectoral
insights. In this article we want to make the case
that this has implications for ES within the context of
landscape management.
The European Landscape Convention (Council of
Europe 2000) enforces the signature parties to legally
acknowledge the landscape as a unit for management in
both ecological and social terms. By defining landscape as
‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the
result of the action and the interaction of natural and/or
human factors’ (Council of Europe 2000), the Convention
moves us straight into the complexity of landscapes. We are
also taken into the daunting complexity of the social world
for the meaning and value of landscapes and ecosystems.
We believe this is a much needed move, though, if we
are to take the ES framework seriously as a framework
for ‘taking account of ecosystem services within decision
making’ (Fish 2011, p. 672). This is consequently
a response to those who argue for opening the door to
‘other social perspectives – those more fully representative
of the vicissitudes of human behavior and the less
tangible social and ethical concerns’ (Chan et al. 2012,
p. 8). Importantly, this also opens the door to acknowledging
the issue of (the nature of) language, both between
the human/social sciences and the natural sciences, as well
as between experts and stakeholders, for decision-making.
The now global debate about ES is taking place within
a wide range of disciplines and institutions. Even though
proponents and critiques coexist within these disciplines
and institutions, it is more often the case that scientific
ES critique is raised from quarters outside core ES disciplines
such as ecology and economy, i.e., quarters often
with scant contact with this ‘core.’ Much of this critique is
directly or indirectly addressing the complicated fact that
the ES framework contains an implicit mix of descriptive
and normative attributes. The purpose of the ES framework
is thus left open for contested and contradictory
interpretations across both science and policy, i.e., it is in
many respects vague and elusive, both conceptually and
methodologically. Strunz (2012) holds that vagueness is
an inherent quality of the social world and consequently
reflected in social sciences – and not a problem per se –
yet it poses huge challenges when it comes to political
decision-making. This is highly relevant for the valuation
and operationalization of ES. More specifically, it concerns
language and knowledge production in a broad sense, and
we return to this later in this article.
So, what is the relevance of a landscape perspective
within this context? By using landscape as a critical lens
on the ES framework, we want to discuss the usefulness
of the ES concept in framing and analyzing the management
of landscapes. Our aim is to illustrate what we believe
are some key areas that need to be critically discussed and
clarified. We wish to point out that, while we may appear
critical to the ES framework, the purpose of this article is
not to argue for the abandonment of the framework but to
engage in a critical discourse in order to develop the framework
further. In the following, we therefore discuss three
interconnected challenges. The first challenge concerns the
ES framework and the logics of landscapes, where we
argue that only with difficulty can one identify compatibility
between the two. The second challenge addresses the
relationship between landscape management and economic
theory. In order to demonstrate this challenge, we investigate
the effects of adapting landscape management to
economic theory through connecting the end products (the
services) and the landscape that produces those services.
Our third challenge revolves around what are termed social
and cultural services within the ES framework and relational
landscape dynamics. The cultural services have not
been treated with credibility within the framework. This is
much due to the scientific language they come in. We are
not, however, reducing the ES debate to merely a question
of semantics. We rather argue that there is a well-developed
social science language that can inform the debate about
ES in general and the social and cultural services in particular.
This article is drawn to a close with a plea that a
landscape perspective could represent an opportunity for
taking social and cultural processes more seriously within
the framework by integrating theoretical developments in
both the social and natural sciences. We end with a note
on how sciences can handle concepts and frameworks
that have gained rhetoric power within political circles.
Rhetoric power within the environmental policy field is
(too) often based in a society–nature schism, i.e., nature as
externality. This, no doubt, has fundamental implications
for the understanding of landscape dynamics, landscape
management, and the design of strategies for sustainable
use (TEEB 2010a).
First challenge: ES and the logics of landscapes
A range of disciplinary perspectives on landscape(s) compete
for explanatory authority on its nature and consequent
dynamics. It is, however, widely acknowledged
that nature and society cannot be regarded as separate
realms. The management of our physical environment must
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International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management 307
rather be considered within a multidimensional framework
where societal values, such as human well-being
and cultural heritage, are recognized (European Science
Foundation 2010). This is also expressed in the ecosystem
approach from which the ES framework emanates. In presentations
of the framework and its terminology, there
is, however, an implicit divide following the traditional
structure in science, with nature providing services and
human society benefitting from it (Costanza et al. 1997;
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). For instance,
ecological systems and the social sphere are often portrayed
as separate entities in conceptual models, with ES
or land use as the connections (see, e.g., Diaz et al.
2011). Notwithstanding that The Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment acknowledges that human management has
created or modified almost all ecosystems, the conceptualization
blurs that long-term interactions between humans
and nature also have created much of the identified services
and are continuously vital for their maintenance.
Examples are biodiversity richness in semi-natural grazing
lands, productivity through plant breeding, water provision
in wetfield cultivation, not to mention many of those
services that are labeled as cultural. There is, thus, a fundamental
paradox inherent in the ES framework: while empirical
evidence increasingly demonstrates that the world’s
ecosystems cannot be understood without accounting for
the strong and often dominant influence of humans, a separationist
way of talking about things is maintained (Head
2007). Moreover, research drawing on the ES concept characteristically
tries to build a unity from single components
by departing from a number of services and then analyzing
interactions and trade-offs (de Groot et al. 2010; RaudseppHearne
et al. 2010). In contrast, a large body of landscape
research within the social sciences and humanities holds
the unity, the landscape, as a premise and a starting point
(cf. Hägerstrand 2001).
Another commonly agreed characteristic of landscape(s)
is spatial variation. The intricate and unique
constellation of material as well as immaterial aspects
in delimited areas demands a design of landscape management
which is able to orchestrate a complex web of
features and processes (TEEB 2010a). In a relational perspective
on society–nature interactions and focusing on the
material dimension, a landscape can be described as an
arena where various societal projects and land use interests
coincide in space and time with physical structures
and nonhuman flows. Such land use interests are, e.g.,
agriculture, forestry, reindeer herding, recreation, cultural
heritage, and nature conservation. The continuous interactions
are influenced by external and internal driving forces,
which affect the power relations between land use interests.
Drivers of land use change operate at various spatial,
temporal, and institutional scales and also differ depending
on local socioeconomic and biophysical characteristics.
The manifestation in the physical landscape, the landscape
dynamics, will be place specific and dependent on concrete
human actions. The landscape dynamic thus results
from the interplay between various land use interests, with
both synergies and trade-offs, as well as on the response
from the nonhuman components affected by the actions
(Hägerstrand 1982; Stenseke et al. Forthcoming 2012).
In terms of ES, the existence of various land use interests
implies that a multitude of services can potentially be generated
within the same landscape (Rodríguez et al. 2006;
Kareiva et al. 2007). In order to design efficient strategies
for sustainable landscape management, it is crucial
to understand the relationships between services within a
specific landscape in the perspective of a multitude of land
use interests (Bennett et al. 2009) and to take into account
trade-offs between different services (Foley et al. 2005;
Tallis et al. 2008; Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010). Because
far from all services can be maximized in an area, measures
dealing with landscape management consequently have to
include priorities. In practice, place-specific negotiations
between various conservation objectives as well as between
conservation objectives and other societal objectives are
inevitable.
The issues of spatial and temporal scales also call for
caution when using ES as a concept within the context of
landscape dynamics. The extent of human mobility and
impact has increased considerably over the last centuries.
This makes it difficult to determine the appropriate scale
for elaborating and analyzing ES. Similarly, there have
been remarkable transformations in modern times in how
humans relate to nature, much due to fundamental urbanization
processes. Moreover, in the developed world the
techniques for cultivation and extraction have shifted, but
also the role and use of the physical environment itself,
with, for example, recreation and outdoor activities for
well-being having developed as an increasingly important
land use interest. What could be labeled as a service is
thus time specific, and the globalization of society makes
it complicated to identify who is served by the ecosystem,
even within delimited areas.
In conclusion, then, we find there is a fundamental
challenge related to ES as a concept and the logics of
landscapes. This is because the conceptualization of ES
insists on reproducing a largely separationist perspective
on humans and nature. At the same time, time and space
scales of inherent heritage values are little recognized.
Second challenge: landscape dynamics and the
economic bias in the ES framework
It is evident that a large part of the research around ES
today is framed around the monetary valuation of services;
for instance, in a literature review by Dick et al.
(2011), 35% of the 1821 papers found contained both
search words ‘ecosystem service∗
’ and ‘econom∗
.’ The
initiative for this focus on the economics of ES came
from conservationists who wanted to strengthen the arguments
against biodiversity losses (Gómez-Baggethun et al.
2009; Salles 2011), while the economists were sometimes
less convinced of this approach (e.g., Hanley et al. 1995;
Nunes and van den Bergh 2001). Nevertheless, considerable
effort has been put into developing methods for
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valuing nonmarket-based ES, including contingent valuation,
choice modeling, the travel cost method, and
hedonic pricing (excellently summarized in TEEB 2010a).
Recently, the concept of payments for ecosystem services
(PES) has attracted a lot of attention as a way of internalizing
environmental externalities by paying land users
to protect or produce certain services. All together, this
places conservation policies right at the core of current
neoclassical economic theory.
Several authors have criticized this move into economics
from various aspects. Van Hecken and Bastiaensen
(2010) point out that the framing of environmental problems
as externalities creates a mind-set where it is
inevitable that there will be inappropriate price signals
for environmental degradation. Wegner and Pascual (2011)
argue that ecosystems and ES have certain characteristics
that challenge some theoretical assumptions of neoclassical
economics, such as intangible dimensions of human
well-being; characteristics based on intrinsical and collective
values rather than values of individual utility; and
dynamics characterized by thresholds, complexity, and
uncertainty (cf. the notion of ‘resilience’; Folke et al.
2004). Kumar and Kumar (2008) discuss the shortcomings
of assumptions on rational economic agents, wellfunctioning
markets, and consistency of preferences in
valuation of ES, while Kosoy and Corbera (2010) base
their criticism of PES on Marxist theory. The latter focus
their discussion on the commodification of ES which they
claim involves narrowing down ecological functions into a
single ‘service.’ This separates services from the ecosystem
and assigns a single exchange value to this service
where prices tend to be socially constructed rather than
reflecting real changes in the quantity or quality of the
service. This obscures complexities and interrelationships
in ecosystems and draws boundaries that are difficult or
impossible to define. Further, valuation has difficulties in
handling varying temporal scales, where the use of discounting
future costs and benefits may have deep ethical
dimensions (TEEB 2010a).
These theoretical problems with economic valuation of
ES are brought to the fore when the approach is placed in
a delimited landscape. Several studies indicate that, when
using a spatially explicit approach, the results of valuation
studies are context or place dependent (e.g., Pagiola
et al. 2004; Satake et al. 2008; Potschin and Haines-Young
2011). For instance, different groups of people may derive
well-being from different ES. This creates winners and
losers as ES change (Daw et al. 2011; also see our first
challenge). The designation of a protected area may thus
be good from a tourism perspective and bring revenue for
tourism companies, but may severely hamper the livelihood
of farmers or hunters who were unable to make the
transition to a new economy. A place-based, or landscape,
perspective is thus necessary in order to specifically deal
with trade-offs and to understand cross-scale or multiscale
impacts of the promotion of particular ES. This becomes
paramount when so-called cultural services are discussed
in our third challenge, as described below.
In an attempt to critically discuss valuation of ES,
Wegner and Pascual (2011) suggest that economic valuation
may be an expedient way of informing policy processes
when (1) the subject of valuation is a simple good
that is privately owned and traded in a market, or where
(2) the subject of valuation is a local project with a limited
spatiotemporal extent. Both of these criteria are seldom fulfilled
in a landscape context. Wegner and Pascual (2011)
further suggest that alternative tools based on deliberative
democracy are better suited when decisions involve intangible
dimensions of human well-being, intrinsic ethics,
critical thresholds, scientific uncertainty, significant distributional
biases, and spatiotemporally extensive ecological
impacts, which characterize many ES. In short, economic
valuation methods seem poorly adapted to ES, and even
more so when applied to a landscape as defined by the
European Landscape Convention.
Third challenge: cultural services and the nature of
relational landscape dynamics
The problem of externalizing and commodifying nature is
well illustrated by what are cast as ‘cultural ES.’ These are
designed to provide an understanding of human benefits
from nature and the consequent social, economic and environmental
changes that arise (UK NEA 2011, Ch. 16, p. 8).
This more explicitly interpretative conception of natural
resources is nevertheless a reductionist view on culture as
a ‘service’ provided by ecosystems, implying ‘a linear and
deterministic relationship between ecosystems and culture’
(Fish 2011, p. 674). Fish (2011) thus aptly points out that
‘advocates of the ecosystem services framework face a
steep climb in winning the hearts and minds of cultural
theorists . . . .’ This is not because the cultural services
identified within the framework, do not, from a cultural
theorist perspective, fall under the rubric of cultural signifiers.
It is rather the scant treatment and poor understanding
of their ‘nature’ which makes the ES framework hard to
embrace. The fact that the so-called cultural services are
a mostly neglected part of the framework is, according to
Schaich et al. (2010), due to a lack of contact between what
might be labeled the ES research community and research
communities that for a long time have been busy analyzing
and explaining the role of so-called cultural services for
human well-being. This is a relevant argument, yet it provides
no answer to why this is the case. Sharman’s critical
observation is useful here: ‘Much current environmental
policy is built on the assumption that ecosystem services
are properties of the ecosystem itself, and therefore independent
of the stakeholder, and at the same time linked to
the biodiversity from which they derive’ (Sharman 2010,
p. 1). In line with Sharman, we find this decontextualized
assumption fundamentally problematic. Context –
whether cultural, social, economic, or spatial – is a crucial
premise for even talking about benefits, services, and
well-being ‘provided’ by ecosystems. Cultural ‘benefits’
have been the concern for many social scientists for a long
time. There are well-developed languages and theories to
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International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management 309
capture the complex nature of these ‘services.’ Importantly,
then, cultural services are not under-researched, nor poorly
understood as such, but they come in a different language.
Furthermore, cultural services cannot and should
not be reduced to externalized ‘services.’ Finally, they
are most often not framed within economics or ecology.
Very often these aspects of nature have been addressed
within a qualitative landscape perspective, and research
has demonstrated that a useful place to start addressing
what can fall under the rubric of ‘cultural services’ is to
talk about landscapes. This is, in fact, acknowledged in
the recently published UK NEA (2011, p. 10) where it
is pointed out that ‘the term “ecosystem services” is not
a meaningful framework for the interpretation of humanenvironment
relationships for the vast majority of people;
yet it has gained recent traction in policy. Culturally, the
concepts which have most meaning are those of “nature”,
“place” and “landscape”’. This points back to the introductory
argument we made about the importance of language
for the conceptualization and operationalization of ES.
According to Strunz (2012, p. 116), common understanding
between stakeholders and scientists are more easily
and usefully framed by everyday language rather than
scientific terms: ‘Conceptual rigor and abstract, theoretical
knowledge do not necessarily contribute to that aim.’ The
ES framework is consequently getting increasing foothold
within environmental policies across the globe, although
not within the public sphere (at least not in Europe),
and to a limited degree among social scientists working
within what we might call the environmental and ecological
humanities (Head et al. 2005); for example, human
geography, anthropology, and environmental history. This
is rather ironic, because it is a fact that cultural services ‘are
seen by stakeholders as highly important, but that there is
uncertainty over how they should be addressed’ (UK NEA
2011, Ch. 16, p. 13).
So rather than taking people’s language seriously, the
UK National Ecosystem Service Assessment (UK NEA
2011) suggests ‘environmental settings’ as the final cultural
ES. An environmental setting, a spatial category crossing
different scales – e.g., a garden, a neighborhood, the
countryside, or the nation – is the unit containing and delivering
cultural services such as heritage values, possibilities
for doing outdoor recreation, and experiencing wildlife.
But does the idea of ‘environmental setting’ advance the
understanding and consequences of social and cultural processes
in relation to ecosystem use and change? We need
yet again to return to the age-old discussion about the
relationship between humans and nature. A whole series
of concepts, ideas, and frameworks within and across the
natural and social sciences have been developed in order
to communicate, capture, and explain our relationship to
nature. All of these have been designed to get both society
and nature right, not to say the relationship between them.
Importantly, these conceptualizations are often competing,
yet united in the fact that they tend to separate humans
from nature. As anthropologist Ingold (2000, p. 58) argues:
‘Something . . . must be wrong somewhere, if the only way
to understand our creative involvement in the world is by
taking ourselves out of it.’ In the ES framework people are
taken out not only once, but twice: first, the way the four
categories of services are designed is not only a demonstration
of a linguistic separation. Provisioning, supporting,
and regulating services are moreover on a different level
than culture, and the first three are seen to belong to the
natural and hard sciences and is within ecology relatively
easily separated from culture. Second, the final cultural
service of ‘environmental setting’ is ironically also taking
people out because a setting is conceptualized as a
rather passive container of human values and practices,
even though it is claimed that a setting is coproduced by
interactions of humans and nature. It thus appears very
hard to assign the environment any form of agency, i.e.,
to handle that the environment comes into being through
people’s embodied practices and aspirations, i.e., it is relational
and processual (Setten 2004). This can be handled
by the current nature of the ES framework only with great
difficulty.
One plea: ecosystemic challenges and landscape
dynamics
We have pointed at three challenges related to the ES
framework and landscape dynamics when it comes to
sustainable landscape management and conservation politics.
We have demonstrated a lack of compatibility between
the framework and the inherent character, or the logics of
landscapes; that difficulties arise in addressing the complexity
of ecosystems, unsubstitutable values, and intangible
dimensions in economic valuation when applied to
landscapes; and that the ES framework to a large degree
falls short in understanding how context-specific sociocultural
processes are crucial to environmental attitudes and
behaviors. Consequently, we want to end on a cautious
note even though many worthwhile and important steps
toward management and conservation have been taken
within the realm of ES research (summarized in TEEB,
2010a, 2010b). We agree, however, with Chan et al. (2007)
in emphasizing that we cannot rely on economics to singlehandedly
reverse the degradation of ecosystems or design
sustainable landscape management. It must be acknowledged
that the lack of convergence between assumptions
in economic theory and the complexity of ecosystems will
more often than not lead to market failures and prevent
an efficient allocation of resources to conservation even
under the best of intentions. In our view, a key issue that
must be further elaborated for future development of the
ES framework is the decoupling of ecosystem function,
caused by the organisms and their interactions, and the
ES that only looks at the end products of those functions
(cf. Peterson et al. 2009), as, e.g., the ‘environmental
setting’ discussed above. For instance, it is problematic
that a key provisioning service such as the production of
fiber from wood may be as, or even more, efficiently produced
by single species, non native stands as produced by
native multispecies forests while being minimally useful
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310 G. Setten et al.
in biodiversity protection (Myers 1984). It is somewhat of
a paradox that initial attempts to argue more strongly and
clearly for ecosystem conservation by focusing on the services
provided (e.g., Ehrlich and Mooney 1983) have led to
a shift in conservation thinking toward economics that may
actually reduce our understanding of human dependence
on ecosystems.
As for the framework’s ability to grasp cultural and
social processes, identifying and measuring cultural services
is to a large extent an exercise in understanding
people’s perceptions of the environment and the subsequent
decision-making processes. So, there is a recognition
in the ES framework that one needs to pay attention to what
we might call ‘cultures of nature’: ‘sets of beliefs, practices
and often unarticulated assumptions which underlie
human relations with the environments in which people
live’ (Head et al. 2005, p. 252). We note that there
are considerable conceptual overlaps between landscapes,
as it is conceptualized in the long tradition of studying
context-specific co-constitutions of humans and nature particularly
within human geography, and what are cast as
cultural services. We argue therefore that landscape is a
missed opportunity for the understanding of human–nature
dynamics: because landscape is an everyday concept, it
provides stakeholders with both a material and symbolic
tool to communicate their feelings, experiences, and shared
knowledge about the co-constitution of the social and natural
worlds. A more interpretative and relational landscape
conception thus contributes to open up for key democratic
issues related to, e.g., use, distribution, and participation
in the management of natural resources, without taking a
reductionist and commodified view on the social world.
Consequently, landscape keeps people in: because landscape
is both symbolic and material, the human is folded
into the concept itself. This is a direct response to the problems
that arise when culture and nature are separated. It is
also a concept used within a large number of disciplines –
‘It has [for example] provided a vehicle for ecological
science to recognize positive as well as negative human
contributions to biodiversity’ (Head Forthcoming 2012) –
as well as within a number of policy fields.
Research on cultures of nature tends, however, to bring
out the tension between science-dominated environmental
research and management and cultural understandings.
We believe that some hindrances for acknowledging landscape
as a fruitful complement to the ES framework are
related to the following points: landscape is a highly
context-specific notion; it is often a subjective feeling; it
is ridden with a complex scientific and political history; it
has different meanings and connotations in different disciplines;
and a number of landscape studies tend to be too
set on the local level. Hence, there is a need to acknowledge
that landscapes are locally manifested yet made by
forces that at present are very much global. Additionally,
and importantly, landscape is not an inherent property of
a narrow set of disciplines. We would thus make a plea
for a closer collaboration between research on ES and
research in the social sciences on landscapes and cultural
‘services.’ Currently, these are parallel research discourses,
each having a deep understanding from their respective
perspectives. We believe it is crucial to create platforms
for improving the possibilities to communicate across these
discourses. This would mean a significant step forward in
understanding and enabling conservation and management
policies in landscapes.
A wider conclusion here points to the need to acknowledge
the distinction between terms used in policy rhetoric
on the one hand, and researchable conceptualizations on
the other. ES debates go well beyond semantics. These
are terms that ‘do work.’ The concept of ES has been
launched to boost argumentation for nature conservation.
Similar to other concepts within the environmental discourse,
it is thus not designed as a tool for scientific
structuring and analyses. This calls for caution when it is
introduced in science; the weaknesses of the concept, and
consequently the framework as a whole, have to be recognized,
made transparent, and addressed. The research
design and methodology have to meet the shortcomings,
and importantly also the analysis and interpretations of the
results. In the quest for sustainability, we need research that
critically scrutinizes frameworks and concepts in tandem
with research aiming at solving problems as they are perceived
in prevailing frameworks for action (Jerneck et al.
2011). In order to find strategies for preventing further
biodiversity losses, research on how to solve the problems
as they are defined and framed in existing paradigms has
to be performed together with research that examines prevailing
institutional orders, power relations, biases in how
problems are framed and defined, and the usefulness and
effectiveness of frameworks and concepts. We believe that
the ideas of landscape and landscape dynamics, cutting
across the challenges we have addressed, can shed light
on the usefulness of the ES framework for conservation
politics, both as a policy tool and an analytical device for
science.
Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that
greatly improved this article. JM was supported by Future
Forests, a multidisciplinary research program supported by the
Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA),
the Swedish Forestry Industry, the Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Umeå University, and the Forestry
Research Institute of Sweden (Skogforsk). MS was supported
by The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural
Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS).
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