The latest ‘engaging people’ column has just been published in the environmentalist, and it’s about ecosystem services and stakeholder engagement.
It was a lot of fun writing this article with the erudite and ebullient Mark Everard, who I first met when working with The Natural Step. Mark is one of that rare – but thankfully increasing – breed of technical experts who really understand the importance and value of stakeholder engagement.
The article explores engaging people in using an ecosystems services approach to understand places, problems and solutions.
It was great to compare experiences of running stakeholder workshops which are either centred on ecosystems services, or included a nod to that way of thinking.
Mark’s experience has been more extensive than mine, and he seems to have witnessed more positive resolutions. When a farmer asked “what is the job of a river” in the workshop I was running, he gave his own answer: it’s to carry water away from farmland as fast as possible. There wasn’t the opportunity to enable a longer conversation which could acknowledge watery multi-tasking, and the benefits people from it.
We all rely on ecosystem services, whether we like it or not. We all eat food. We all drink water. We all breathe air. Mostly, in a country like the UK, we just don’t realise that these are ecosystem services – carrots come from the supermarket, not an ecosystem.
But it seems to me that some people feel threatened by the weight given to ecosystem services which seem – to them – to be more ‘about birds than people’. Dialogue which enables deeper understanding of our dependence on the natural world is enormously helpful, but in my experience it is hard to engage people in this kind of conversation when they are suspicious that the process it is part of is an excuse for stopping them meeting what they see as their more immediate and direct needs.
So I’m excited to hear about Mark’s successes in moving beyond mistrust.
I too had great fun talking through and editing this with Penny, who is always challenging and good fun to work with!
Although I have worked with ecosystem services for the past twenty years, and across five continents though finding their power maximised in an African/developing world context, it is good to see the approach breaking through here and across the world since publication of the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and championed in the UK by Defra who deserve much credit.
It is, of course, strange to see ecosystem services greeted as a new concept, all these years down the line! Penny is right that some on the business side see it ‘more about birds than people’. Meanwhile, some on the conservation side see it as ‘commoditising nature’ rather than acknowledging the inherent, non-human worth of species and ecosystems. (The opposing point and hard reality to this is that, unless ascribed some value, ecosystems are deemed worthless in decision-making.)
The reality is that ecosystem services straddle all three worlds: they relate to how ecosystems function and deliver benefits to society (many historically overlooked as such), which can often be monetised or valued in other ways. Interlinking ecology, societal needs and economy… a powerful and practical tool for the gritty practice of sustainable development, and perfect as an intuitive dialogic tool about how we share limited ecosystem capacities. (For more on this, see my book ‘The Business of Biodiversity’.)
We are entering a new phase of cultural evolution, armed with the tools to look beyond merely the narrowly-framed benefits from the way (generally privileged) sectors of society exploit resources; we can now better consider, ideally in a stakeholder context, the wider ramifications of how we do so. This gives me optimism in troubled time.
Mark Everard
November 9th, 2009 at 10:17 am