Expectations about voluntary efforts in collaborative governance and the fit with perceived prerequisites of intrinsic motivation in Sweden’s ecosystem-based moose management system

Collaborative governance regimes may be vulnerable because of dependency on stakeholders??? voluntary engagement and efforts. This study focuses on the Swedish moose management system, a multi-level collaborative governance regime inspired by the ecosystem approach. Self-determination theory is used to explore perceived prerequisites of basic needs for intrinsic motivation across sub-groups of stakeholder representatives who are engaged across different social-ecological contexts. Questionnaire data collected among representatives at two governance levels, moose management groups (n = 624) and moose management units (n = 979), were subjected to two-step cluster analysis. The analyses revealed two sub-groups of representatives, characterized by differences in species composition and land ownership structure: managers of multi-ungulate areas and managers of large-carnivore areas. In several respects, these groups significantly differed in how they perceived the prerequisites. This included prerequisites of perceived competence with regard to their need for knowledge of topics and usefulness of monitoring methods, perceived autonomy operationalized as possibilities to perform their tasks with sufficient time, resources, and support from their organizations, and perceived relatedness to different groups of actors. Further efforts should be made to understand the conditions required for representatives to energize and direct their behavior. The institutional system must better fit the needs of stakeholder representatives across various local contexts, otherwise the space for local voluntary engagement might be hampered

Achieving Social and Ecological Outcomes in Collaborative Environmental Governance: Good Examples from Swedish Moose Management

Collaborative governance approaches have been suggested as strategies to handle wicked environmental problems. Evaluations have found promising examples of effective natural resource governance, but also highlighted the importance of social-ecological context and institutional design. The aim of this study was to identify factors that contribute to the achievement of social and ecological sustainability within Swedish moose (Alces alces) management. In 2012, a multi-level collaborative governance regime was implemented to decrease conflicts among stakeholders. We carried out semi-structured interviews with six 'good examples' (i.e., Moose Management Groups that showed positive social and ecological outcomes). We found that 'good examples' collectively identified existing knowledge gaps and management challenges and used their discretionary power to develop procedural arrangements that are adapted to the social-ecological context, their theory of change, and attributes of local actors. This contributed to the creation of bridging social capital and principled engagement across governance levels. Thus, our results indicate the existence of higher-order social learning as well as a positive feedback from within-level collaboration dynamics to between-level collaboration. Furthermore, our study illustrates the importance of institutional flexibility to utilize the existing knowledge across stakeholder groups and to allow for adaptations based on the social learning process

Direct and indirect effects of food, fear and management on crop damage by ungulates

Foraging on crops by wild ungulates may create human–wildlife conflicts through reducing crop production. Ungulates interact with and within complex socio-ecological systems, making the reduction of crop damage a challenging task. Aside from ungulate densities, crop damage is influenced by different drivers affecting ungulate foraging behaviour: food availability and food quality in the landscape (i.e. the foodscape) as well as fear from hunting and scaring actions (i.e. the landscape of fear) may together affect the degree of damage via both direct and indirect effects. A better understanding of the individual effects of these potential drivers behind crop damage is needed, as is an appreciation of whether the effects are dependent on ungulate density.We investigated this by applying path analysis to test indirect and direct links between ungulate density, foodscape, landscape of fear and human management goals on crop damage of oats and grass, respectively.Our results suggest that crop type is the major driver behind crop damage, with more damage to oats than to leys, implying that human decisions (i.e. changing crop type) influence the level of crop damage.We found that management goals and actions influenced the foodscape and the landscape of fear, by affecting the amount of forage produced in the agricultural landscape and the amount of scaring actions. Additionally, we found that supplementary feeding influenced the local ungulate densities in the area.Our results highlight the importance of including human actions on multiple levels when assessing drivers behind damage by ungulates in managed landscapes. We suggest that more studies using path analysis on multiple scales are needed in order to tackle complex issues, such as crop damage and other human–wildlife conflicts

Browsing Damage on Scots Pine: Direct and Indirect Effects of Landscape Characteristics, Moose and Deer Populations

Reducing browsing damages from cervids (Cervidae) on economically valuable tree species is a challenging task in many countries. Apart from cervid abundance, landscape characteristics, such as forest composition, land use, forage availability and climatic conditions, may affect the degree of browsing through both direct and indirect effects. A better understanding of basic mechanisms in this complex system is needed to design efficient and convincing management strategies. Focusing on Sweden as a case, which has been widely studied using regression analyses only, we applied path analysis to test the validity of a model on the indirect and direct links between landscape characteristics, cervid populations, and browsing damages on Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). Our results validated the tested model in which moose (Alces alces) density and pine availability directly influence browsing damages. Increasing amounts of pine forests, preferred deciduous trees, and young forest had positive direct effects on moose densities and thereby indirectly contributed to increased browsing damages. The density of smaller deer species showed no direct effect on browsing damages on pine. Path analysis corroborated our attempt to disentangle direct and indirect potential causal drivers of browsing damages and shows that the choice of statistical method may alter the understanding of mechanistic driving forces

Evaluating the outcomes of collaborative wildlife governance: The role of social-ecological system context and collaboration dynamics

The acknowledgement of uncertainty and complexity in social-ecological systems has increased the implementation of collaborative governance regimes for environmental issues. The performance of these new regimes to deliver favourable social and ecological outcomes must therefore be evaluated. We focus on the case of Swedish wildlife governance, which has a tradition of using collaborative elements. In relation to moose (Alces alces), these collaborative aspects were recently formalized in an amended policy. We aim to assess some aspects of this new regime's performance with respect to intermediate ecological outcomes (i.e. quota fulfilment). We use path analysis to test the causal effects of system context and collaboration dynamics on governance outcomes. Collaboration dynamics were assessed using a web-based survey sent to all stakeholders in Moose Management Groups (response rate = 82 %). Our originally specified model yielded a good fit (SRMR of .030 and robust TLI of .996) and explained 20 % of the variation in outcomes. Context variables revealed significant direct effects on collaboration dynamics and outcomes. Larger Moose Management Areas and fluctuations in forage availability required more time investment from actors, while high land use diversity and density of other ungulate species negatively affected moose quota fulfilment. Moose Management Groups that invested more time and perceived to have a good knowledge base achieved better quota fulfilment. Collaboration dynamics thus had a positive direct effect on outcomes. From a policy perspective, our results raise questions regarding institutional fit because context factors had significant negative effects on collaboration dynamics and the outcomes of the collaborative process