Good Ecosystem Governance: Balancing Ecosystems and Social Needs

The overarching problem behind the need for good ecosystem governance is the fact that human needs for water, food, energy, etc., generally demand manipulations of landscape components. Due to water’s role as the bloodstream of the biosphere, with many parallel functions in the landscape, and ecosystems’ water-dependence, ecosystems tend to get impacted by those manipulations. Societal activities that have to be incorporated in good ecosystem governance include land use change, water use, flow control, waste production, and alien species. Different distinctions have been highlighted: i.e. between avoidable and unavoidable manipulations, and between local ecological landscape components as opposed to the whole catchment as a composite ecosystem. There are also two contrasting time perspectives to keep in mind: repairing of already-manifested ecosystem degradation versus avoiding foreseeable future ecosystem degradation in a world living with change in response to strong societal driving forces. Local-scale ecosystems have to be protected by addressing their key water determinants; catchment-scale ecosystems by benefiting from water’s function as an integrator through efforts to orchestrate society-driven manipulations for internal compatibility. The latter involves trade-off striking and balancing of different interests, and will demand both well organised stakeholder participation, and the definition of bottom lines and resilience criteria to protect key ecosystems. Good ecosystem governance has been characterised as follows: WHAT to govern, i.e. human activities in the landscape, HOW to govern involves an array of consecutive steps: fact finding and problem analysis; strategic plan of action; tools to make such action possible, such as legislation, financing, competent institutions, stakeholder participation etc.; and tools to secure its implementation, such as incentives/sanctions, capacity building, media campaigns, etc. The road towards good ecosystem governance will be demanding due to the dominance, at present, of partial reality-conceptualisation. A shift in thinking is absolutely essential to get out of this trap. Good understanding will be needed in the three different systems: natural biophysical system, social system, and governance system. The Trialogue hypothesis could be improved by changing the ‘Science process’ corner of the triangular model into a ‘Biophysical process’ corner. Science processes will be needed for all the three components of the Trialogue.