Caught between personal and collective values: biodiversity conservation in European decision-making

Individual decision‐makers at different governance levels operate in social contexts, which means that they sometimes need to compromise their personal values. Yet, this dissonance is rarely the direct target of empirical analyses of environmental decision‐making. We undertake a Q‐analysis of decision‐makers' personal perspectives and the perspectives they perceive to dominate in their decision‐making contexts. Our empirical analysis addresses biodiversity conservation, which has traditionally been justified with intrinsic value‐ and science‐based arguments. The arguments have recently been broadened with the concept of ecosystem services, highlighting human benefits and values. This evolving context is interesting because of the new rise of anthropocentric values, which can lead to decision‐makers experiencing dissonance. Our analysis of interviews with 43 biodiversity conservation decision‐makers from nine European countries reveals four personally held perspectives that highlight different, yet partly overlapping, values – intrinsic, human benefit, conservation and connection – as well as three perspectives perceived to dominate in decision‐making – utilitarian, insurance and knowledge values. The comparison of personally held and perceived dominant perspectives points to one major conflict: those decision‐makers who personally associate with intrinsic values and perceive utilitarian values to dominate in decision‐making experience dissonance. By contrast, personally held human benefit values are accommodated well in decision‐making contexts and decision‐makers who perceive insurance values to dominate experience the least conflict with personally held values. These findings demonstrate the potential of arguments stressing long‐term benefits for easing tension and conflicts in conservation decision‐making, and the usefulness of empirically testing of the coincidence of individual and social values.peerReviewe

Final report synthesising the analysis of argumentation in multi-level governance interactions in case studies : Deliverable No: 3.1, EC Contract Ref: FP7-ENV-2011-282743

This report provides a synthesis of argumentation analysis in real-world cases in “multi-level biodiversity governance”, investigated within the BESAFE project. The following broad research questions guided the synthesis of argumentation analysis in the case studies:• Which (different types of) arguments can be identified at different levels and units of biodiversity governance?• How are these arguments exchanged and put to work in multi-level and networked interactions (i.e. within and across different levels and units of biodiversity governance)?• How are these arguments rooted in and how do they feed into different perspectives, worldviews and functioning of social groups or institutions at the different levels and units of biodiversity governance?The study’s approach to answering these questions is guided by a three layer analytical framework. This framework comprises three different perspectives to argument-making practice. Together these enable a comprehensive understanding of the role of argumentation in multi-level biodiversity governance.The first layer takes the perspective that arguments are “products” of communication. The analysis focuses on the verbal content of arguments, i.e. what these arguments “say”. By comparing argument contents between global, European, national, regional and local governance levels, it was revealed that at both global and regional level, social arguments were most dominant, while at the European level economic arguments were more prominent. Comparison between European and national governance levels revealed little differences. Comparison between types of actors showed some differences of emphasis. Whereas most actors use the argument that biodiversity should be protected because of its inherent value, regional authorities more often referred to social wellbeing and national authorities to legal obligation. The analysis also considered variety of arguments. In general, variety was very limited. Politicians used the smallest variety of arguments, while the largest variety was found in the science actors. Furthermore, variety depended on communication channels (e.g. internet forums showed much variety). Lastly, arguments do change over time. Arguments on ecosystem services, for instance, became prominent at both global and European levels, but they often do not reach or persist at local levels of governance.The second layer of the framework uses the perspective of arguments being transactions between arguers and audiences. The focus here is on what actors “do”D3.1 Final report synthesising the analysis of argumentation in multi-levelgovernance interactions in case studies5with arguments, that is, what they aim to achieve with the arguments and what strategies they use. Plenty of strategies were identified, such as particularisation (e.g. stressing the uniqueness of a natural area to increase policy attention), up-scaling (e.g. situating a biodiversity problem at a higher level of space or time to make it more important), dichotomisation (e.g. polarising between two alternatives to exclude the possibility of an intermediate solution) and aligning arguments to the goals and interests of others to affect policy outcomes in a way that suits own interests. Finally, actors used various channels to transmit argument. Main examples were local politicians, NGOs and mass media.The third layer takes the perspective of arguments as being conditioned by the social-institutional networks in which they are transmitted. The analysis focuses on how the arguments and the reasoning they communicate “fit” into the different perspectives, worldviews and functioning of social groups and institutions. It was shown that argumentation was highly conditioned by law and regulations, institutional roles and established practices. International obligation, in particular, empowered member states to implement biodiversity policy and to finish disputes. But legislation (and uncertainty about it) also hampered conservation efforts. Furthermore, established criteria used in conservation practice (e.g. rarity, threat and species richness) supported justification of the need for implementing biodiversity conservation measures. Finally, what actors considered as their interests and what they valued as a legitimate policy process (democratic, science-based and sufficient societal support) conditioned the argumentation

Assessment of ecosystem integrity and service gradients across Europe using the LTER Europe network

Better integration of knowledge from ecological, social and economic science is necessary to advance the understanding and modelling of socio-ecological systems. To model ecosystem integrity (EI) and ecosystem services (ES) at the landscape scale, assessment matrices are commonly used. These matrices assign capacities to provide different services to different land cover types. We revised such an existing matrix and examined the regional heterogeneity in EI and ES provision in Europe and searched for spatial gradients in their provision to elucidate their suitability for large-scale EI and ES mapping in Europe. Overall, 28 sites belonging to the Long-Term Ecological Research network in Europe participated in this study, covering a longitudinal gradient from Spain to Bulgaria and a latitudinal gradient from Italy to Sweden. As a primary outcome, an improved and consolidated EI and ES matrix was achieved with 17.5% of all matrix fields updated. For the first time, this new matrix also contains measures of uncertainty for each entry. EI and ES provision assessments were more variable for natural and semi-natural than for more anthropogenically dominated land cover classes. Among the main types of EI and ES, cultural service provision was rated most heterogeneously in Europe, while abiotic provisioning services were more constant. Longitudinal and latitudinal EI and ES gradients were mostly detected in natural and semi-natural land cover types where temperature and precipitation are major drivers. In anthropogenically determined systems in which cultural services play a dominant role, temperature and precipitation gradients were less important. Our results suggest that this matrix approach to assess EI and ES provision principally works on broad spatial scales; however, local assessments for natural systems seem to be less generalizable than assessments from anthropogenically determined systemsVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŽemės ūkio akademij