Part of a series of posts about IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and an inside look at its processes.
[The following is an edited synopsis of
part of our longer official response on March 12 in Science about nature's contributions to people (NCP). Re: the original article, see this IPBES news item.]
Given that the Inuit
have over 50 words for snow, how does an Inuit person translate a white skier’s
question, “How’s the snow?” Without a precise mapping of terms, the translation
is likely to include other dimensions of meaning, including the ‘positionality’
of the questioner (a white outsider) and the underlying purpose (recreating on
Inuit territory). There is no way for any outsider’s language and
concepts--e.g., about ecosystem services--not to suffer the same fate: they will
both lose meaning that is crucial to locals, while also accruing conceptual
baggage that may alienate them. A key point of the NCP approach is to
explicitly recognize the legitimacy of a context-specific understanding, which
defies the predetermined categorization that is so central to the
ecosystem-services approach. And thus NCP is not merely political compromise
but rather a broadening of epistemologies.
The snow allegory
illustrates elements of the statement that “ecosystem services are NCP”: yes, ‘ecosystem
services’ represents an important subset of
ways of understanding nature’s diverse contributions to people. For
some—including many social scientists and humanities scholars—there is
hesitation or resistance to engage with ‘ecosystem services’, since the term
comes with a conceptual baggage regarding the implicit assumptions and intended
purpose. Not only is there the troubling connotation in the analogy of
ecosystems as service-providers like factories (Norgaard 2010), but ‘ecosystem
services’ has become associated at least partly with the notion of pricing
nature so as to save it (Spash 2008; Dempsey & Robertson 2012; Crouzat
2018; Castree 2017). NCP represents a response, to broaden the tent by
broadening the term.
Our promotion of NCP is
no battle for territory: ecosystem services researchers should keep using that
term, and we will too—in appropriate contexts. It remains in IPBES’ name, our
job titles, and our explanations of who we are and what we do. It is perfectly
functional for some audiences, and preferable for others—but not all (Fairbank
2010). In some other contexts, we will use NCP in order to intentionally signal
an approach that explicitly invites and embraces diverse conceptions of nature
and our relationships with it. This conceptual broadening is especially
important when stakeholders do not accept the stock-flow metaphor associated
with narrowing down nature to natural capital and
all of its contributions as services (Chan et
al. 2016; Pollini 2016; Pascual et al. 2017).
The issue is not whether
the social sciences and humanities are represented in the field, but how
visible and comfortable they are, whether there could be more, and if it would
be productive. There are important social-science and humanities contributions in
ecosystem services, and we have all intentionally strived to make more space
for these (Chan et al. 2012; Martín-López et al. 2014; Pascual et al., 2014;
Díaz et al. 2015; Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016; Stenseke & Larigauderie
2017). But many review papers have found a narrow engagement of ecosystem
services research with the social sciences (Liquete et al. 2013; Haase et al.
2014; Nieto-Romero et al. 2014; Chaudhary et al. 2015; Luederitz et al. 2015;
Fagerholm et al. 2016). We know of many excellent social scholars who have been
turned off by the term, and some who have engaged and have contributed
importantly report a persistent queasiness (Satterfield et al. 2013; Satz et
al. 2013).
We favour a big tent for
this party that is research on nature’s contributions, and terms aren’t
one-size-fit-all. Since many scholars report continued chafing with ‘ecosystem
services’, despite our efforts to stretch it, we simply intend to provide a new
term to invite a broader range of scholars and knowledge holders.
References:
Berbés-Blázquez,
M., J. A. González and U. Pascual (2016). "Towards an ecosystem services
approach that addresses social power relations." Current Opinion in
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Castree, N.
(2017). "Speaking for the ‘people disciplines’: Global change science and
its human dimensions." The Anthropocene Review 4(3):
160-182. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2053019617734249
Chan, K. M. A.,
T. Satterfield and J. Goldstein (2012). "Rethinking ecosystem services to
better address and navigate cultural values." Ecological Economics 74(February):
8-18. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800911004927
Chan, K. M. A.,
P. Balvanera, K. Benessaiah, et al. (2016). "Why protect nature?
Rethinking values and the environment." PNAS 113(6):
1462–1465. http://www.pnas.org/content/113/6/1462.full
Chaudhary, S., A.
McGregor, D. Houston and N. Chettri (2015). "The evolution of ecosystem
services: A time series and discourse-centered analysis." Environmental
Science & Policy 54: 25-34. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901115001239
Crouzat, E., I.
Arpin, L. Brunet, M. J. Colloff, F. Turkelboom and S. Lavorel (2018).
"Researchers must be aware of their roles at the interface of ecosystem
services science and policy." Ambio 47(1): 97-105. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-017-0939-1
Dempsey, J. and
M. M. Robertson (2012). "Ecosystem services: Tensions, impurities, and
points of engagement within neoliberalism." Progress in Human Geography.
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/03/13/0309132512437076.abstract
Díaz, S., S.
Demissew, C. Joly, et al. (2015). "The IPBES Conceptual Framework -
connecting nature and people." Current Opinion in Environmental
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Fagerholm, N., M.
Torralba, P. J. Burgess and T. Plieninger (2016). "A systematic map of
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Piroddi, E. G. Drakou, L. Gurney, S. Katsanevakis, A. Charef and B. Egoh
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U., Phelps, J., Garmendia, E., Brown, K., Corbera, E., Martin, A.,
Gomez-Baggethun, E., Muradian, R. (2014). Social Equity matters in Payments for
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