Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

The concept of ecosystem services is increasingly being promoted by academics and policy makers as a means to protect ecological systems through more informed decision making. A basic premise of this approach is that strengthening the ecological knowledge base will significantly enhance ecosystem health through more sensitive decision making. However, the existing literature on knowledge utilisation, and many previous attempts to improve decision making through better knowledge integration, suggest that producing ‘more knowledge’ is only ever a necessary but insufficient condition for greater policy success. We begin this paper by reviewing what is already known about the relationship between ecological knowledge development and utilisation, before introducing a set of theme issue papers that examine—for the very first time—how this politically and scientifically salient relationship plays out across a number of vital policy venues such as land-use planning, policy-level impact assessment, and cost–benefit analysis. Following a detailed synthesis of the key findings of all the papers, this paper identifies and explores new research and policy challenges in this important and dynamic area of environmental governance.

The increased salience of how to value ecosystems services has driven up the demand for policy-relevant knowledge. It is clear that advice by epistemic communities can show up in policy outcomes, yet little systematic analysis exists prescribing how this can actually be achieved. This paper draws on four decades of knowledge utilisation research to propose four types of ‘possible expert’ who might be influential on ecosystems services. Broad findings of a literature review on knowledge use in public policy are reported, and the four-fold conceptualisation pioneered by Carol Weiss that defines the literature is outlined. The field is then systematised by placing these four modes of knowledge use within an explanatory typology of policy learning. With how, when, and why experts and their knowledge are likely to show up in policy outcomes established, the paper then proposes the boundaries of the possible in how the ecosystems services epistemic community might navigate the challenges associated with each learning mode. Four possible experts emerge: with political antenna and epistemic humility; with the ability to speak locally and early to the hearts and minds of citizens; with a willingness to advocate policy; and, finally, with an enhanced institutional awareness and peripheral policy vision. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the utility of the analysis.

Assessments of environmental issues are often expected to tackle the perceived disconnect between scientific knowledge and environmental policy making. However, their actual influence on processes of knowledge communication and use remains understudied. We provide one of the first studies of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA), itself one of the first national-level assessments of ecosystem services. We explore expectations, early experiences, and implications for its role in promoting knowledge use, drawing on both documentary evidence and qualitative analysis of interviews with NEA authors and potential users. Many interviewees expected instrumental use; that is, facts directly assisting problem solving. This matches the rhetoric surrounding the NEA's creation. However, we found more early evidence of interacting conceptual uses (learning), and strategic uses (sometimes deemed misuse). Such uses depend not only on assessment outputs, such as reports, but also on the processes of communication and interaction by which these are created. Thus, planning and analysis of such assessments should deemphasise instrumental use and instead focus on the complex knowledge ‘coproduction’ processes by which diverse and interacting forms of knowledge use may be realised.

The ‘ecosystem services approach’ (ESA) to policy making has refocused attention on how knowledge is embedded in policy. Appraisal has long been identified as an important venue for embedding, but suffers from well-known difficulties. This paper examines the extent to which an ESA appears in UK policy appraisal documents, and how far implementing an ESA via appraisal may encounter the same difficulties. A clear understanding of this is vital for interrogating claims that improving knowledge necessarily leads to more sustainable ecosystem management. The paper reports on the content of seventy-five national-level policy appraisals undertaken in the United Kingdom between 2008 and 2012. Only some elements of an ESA appear, with even the environment ministry failing to systematically pick up the concept, which is indeed subject to many of the familiar barriers to embedding environmental knowledge in appraisals. Policy initiatives attempting to institutionalise ecosystem values need to be conversant with these barriers.

Proponents of ecosystem services approaches to assessment claim that it will ensure the environment is ‘properly valued’ in decision making. Analysts seeking to understand the likelihood of this could usefully reexamine previous attempts to deploy novel assessment processes in land-use planning and how they affect decisions. This paper draws insights from a meta-analysis of three case studies: environmental capital, ecological footprinting, and green infrastructure. Concepts from science and technology studies are used to interpret how credibility for each new assessment process was assembled, and the ways by which the status of knowledge produced becomes negotiable or prescriptive. The influence of these processes on planning decisions is shown to be uneven, and depends on a combination of institutional setting and problem framing, not simply knowledge content. The analysis shows how actively cultivating wide stakeholder buy-in to new assessment approaches may secure wider support, but not necessarily translate into major influence on decisions.

Managing ecosystems for multiple benefits and stakeholders is a formidable challenge requiring diverse knowledge to be discovered, transmitted, and aggregated. Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is advocated as a theoretically grounded decision-support tool, but in practice it frequently appears to exert little influence. To understand this puzzle, I consider ecosystem knowledge and CBA from both the demand and supply sides. I argue that all ecosystem knowledge is contestable, which restricts the influence of technocratic tools like CBA. On the demand side, democratic mechanisms shape decision makers' motivations and incentives, but also provide a substitute for technocratic evidence. Supply-side factors limiting the influence of CBA include the scarcity of decision-pertinent evidence and the uncertain meaning and usefulness of CBA. Demand-side factors are resistant to change; but taking account of them, I suggest some supply-side reforms, arguing that CBA is best regarded not as a tool but as a venue where ecosystem knowledge is aggregated and contested.

The ecosystem approach is used to analyse four case studies from England to determine what kind of ecosystem knowledge was used by people, and how it shaped their arguments. The results are reported across decision-making venues concerned with: innovation, conflict management, maintenance of ecosystem function, and recognising the environment as an asset. In each area we identify the sources and uses of conceptual, instrumental, political, and social knowledge. We found that the use of these knowledges can benefit the process as well as the quality of outcomes, and so ‘add value’ to the decision-making process. However, the case studies did not exhibit any simple linear–rational model of knowledge use. Ecosystems thinking took many forms and depended on different institutional settings. As an argument-making device, the ecosystem approach must be seen in the context of a wider set of social and political processes, which involves a range of complex strategies and motives that explain the apparent ‘messiness’ of environmental decision making. The paper demonstrates that as a conceptual framework, the ecosystem approach provides a valuable theoretical template to help us discover how and what knowledge is used in deliberative styles of decision making.

The limited understanding of how ecosystem service knowledge (ESK) is used in decision making constrains our ability to learn from, replicate, and convey success stories. We explore use of ESK in decision making in three international cases: national coastal planning in Belize; regional marine spatial planning on Vancouver Island, Canada; and regional land-use planning on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Decision makers, scientists, and stakeholders collaborated in each case to use a standardized ecosystem service accounting tool to inform spatial planning. We evaluate interview, survey, and observation data to assess evidence of ‘conceptual’, ‘strategic’, and ‘instrumental’ use of ESK. We find evidence of all modes: conceptual use dominates early planning, while strategic and instrumental uses occur iteratively in middle and late stages. Conceptual and strategic uses of ESK build understanding and compromise that facilitate instrumental use. We highlight attributes of ESK, characteristics of the process, and general conditions that appear to affect how knowledge is used. Meaningful participation, scenario development, and integration of local and traditional knowledge emerge as important for particular uses.

In this paper we explore the spin-off process from London's universities using a regional innovation systems (RIS) framework. We examine the pattern of spin-offs in the context of changes in institutional support systems, both within the universities and in the London region. The majority of the university-related spin-offs are small and medium-sized enterprises concentrated in biomedical sectors, as elsewhere. However, over a third have left London. We explore these patterns, the implications for understanding the role of universities in RIS, and consequent policy implications.

Climate change is a powerful reminder of the interdependencies of the human–nature relationship and the fallacy of the modernist assumption about our ability to tame nature for our exploitation with little or no consequences. However, it is argued that such reflexivity is being subverted by the dominant discourses of climate change which portray: nature as risk, our relation to it in terms of security, and the quest for urban resilience as emergency planning. By construing nature as a threat to rather than an asset for cities, they signify a departure from sustainability discourses. They represent a hark back to a premodern conception of human–nature relations that was centred on what nature does to us rather than what we do to nature. Seeing nature as risk ushers in deep concerns with security. The ‘risk society’ becomes entwined with the security society. This paper examines the political implications of this discursive shift and argues that, as securitisation becomes the hegemonic discourse of our time, the postpolitics of hope, which underpinned sustainability, is giving way to the postpolitics of fear which underlies climate change.