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
Environmental Sustainability 19: 134-143. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877343516300070
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
Sustainability 14(June): 1-16. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187734351400116X
Fagerholm, N., M.
Torralba, P. J. Burgess and T. Plieninger (2016). "A systematic map of
ecosystem services assessments around European agroforestry." Ecological
Indicators 62: 47-65. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X15006482
Fairbank, M.,
Maullin, Metz and Associates, and Public Opinion Strategies (2010). National
public opinion research project, The Nature Conservancy.
Haase, D., N.
Larondelle, E. Andersson, et al. (2014). "A quantitative review of urban
ecosystem service assessments: Concepts, models, and implementation." AMBIO
43(4): 413-433. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-014-0504-0
Liquete, C., C.
Piroddi, E. G. Drakou, L. Gurney, S. Katsanevakis, A. Charef and B. Egoh
(2013). "Current status and future prospects for the assessment of marine
and coastal ecosystem services: A systematic review." PLoS ONE 8(7):
e67737. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0067737
Luederitz, C., E.
Brink, F. Gralla, et al. (2015). "A review of urban ecosystem services:
six key challenges for future research." Ecosystem Services 14:
98-112. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041615300024
Martín-López, B.,
E. Gómez-Baggethun, M. García-Llorente and C. Montes (2014). "Trade-offs
across value-domains in ecosystem services assessment." Ecological
Indicators 37, Part A(0): 220-228. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X1300109X
Nieto-Romero,
M, Oteros-Rozas, E., González, J.A. and B Martín-López (2014) Exploring the
knowledge landscape of ecosystem services assessments in Mediterranean
agroecosystems: insights for future research. Environmental Science &
Policy 37: 121-133 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2013.09.003
Norgaard, R. B.
(2010). "Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity
blinder." Ecological Economics 69(6): 1219-1227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.009
Pascual,
U., Phelps, J., Garmendia, E., Brown, K., Corbera, E., Martin, A.,
Gomez-Baggethun, E., Muradian, R. (2014). Social Equity matters in Payments for
Ecosystem Services. Bioscience 64(11): 1027-1036 doi:
10.1093/biosci/biu146
Pascual, U., P.
Balvanera, S. Díaz, et al. (2017). "Valuing nature’s contributions to
people: the IPBES approach." Current Opinion in Environmental
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(2016). Construction of nature. International Encyclopedia of Geography:
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Satterfield, T.,
R. Gregory, S. Klain, M. Roberts and K. M. Chan (2013). "Culture,
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The debate continues, by email! Following this blog post, collaborators on a multi-institution grant pointed to a new piece in response to Díaz et al., and expressed concerns re: word-buzziness. My response follows:
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for your responses! To be honest, I agree with both of you, both about debate about concepts and also about concerns with buzzwords. I was reluctant to engage in the NCP paper for these reasons, but I eventually came around based on the logic of the blog post (above).
A key point here is that the Díaz et al. article is not really critical of the ecosystem services literature so much as the term (in some contexts). Many of us have contributed to the ES literature and intend to continue doing so. I for one am not in favour of using NCP instead of ES in ‘generalizing’ contexts; the ES term has done well there.
For this reason, I agree completely that the ES literature has seen tremendous advance in the past 10-15 years, but we were not primarily critiquing the literature. Certainly not the cutting-edge stuff. We were in part critiquing the continued obsession with certain simplified views (stock-and-flow), including monetary valuation using benefit transfer. You all may not read those articles, but I have done a quantitative review, and the preponderance of ‘ES’ research is still simplistic in those ways.
For these reasons, I think we’re on the same page, and I cannot reconcile some of the claims in the One Ecosystem piece with Díaz et al. Maes et al. say, “Díaz et al. 2018 present ES as a "narrow economic approach" built on a market-based value framework.” But I don’t think we do any such thing. Rather, we write, “[This NCP approach] should also be less likely to be subsumed within a narrow economic (such as market-based) approach as the mediating factor between people and nature.”
See, we’re expressing concern about the ES term being coopted, not critiquing the ES literature. Make sense?
Best,
Kai