Meeting places and social capital supporting rural landscape stewardship : A Pan-European horizon scanning

Achieving sustainable development as an inclusive societal process in rural landscapes, and sustainability in terms of functional green infrastructures for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, are wicked challenges. Competing claims from various sectors call for evidence-based adaptive collaborative governance. Leveraging such approaches requires maintenance of several forms of social interactions and capitals. Focusing on Pan-European regions with different environmental histories and cultures, we estimate the state and trends of two groups of factors underpinning rural landscape stewardship, namely, (1) traditional rural landscape and novel face-to-face as well as virtual fora for social interaction, and (2) bonding, bridging, and linking forms of social capital. We applied horizon scanning to 16 local landscapes located in 18 countries, representing Pan-European social-ecological and cultural gradients. The resulting narratives, and rapid appraisal knowledge, were used to estimate portfolios of different fora for social interactions and forms of social capital supporting landscape stewardship. The portfolios of fora for social interactions were linked to societal cultures across the European continent: “self-expression and secular-rational values” in the northwest, “Catholic” in the south, and “survival and traditional authority values” in the East. This was explained by the role of traditional secular and religious local meeting places. Virtual internet-based fora were most widespread. Bonding social capitals were the strongest across the case study landscapes, and linking social capitals were the weakest. This applied to all three groups of fora. Pan-European social-ecological contexts can be divided into distinct clusters with respect to the portfolios of different fora supporting landscape stewardship, which draw mostly on bonding and bridging forms of social capital. This emphasizes the need for regionally and culturally adapted approaches to landscape stewardship, which are underpinned by evidence-based knowledge about how to sustain green infrastructures based on both forest naturalness and cultural landscape values. Sharing knowledge from comparative studies can strengthen linking social capital

Connecting social and ecological systems

The role of forests and forestry is changing in the contemporary society. For a long time forestry and forest sciences were able to establish and maintain an own identity as a professional guild. However, in present days, communication and co-ordination of activities with other sectors and interests have become a prerequisite in many parts of densely populated Europe, and this trend is spreading. To accommodate and address this change in forestry/forest research, tools from both the natural and social sciences are needed and should be used to: (i) evaluate the needs of society in particular landscape in order to be able to develop applications of conventional forest science knowledge base; and (ii) communicate to the society, policymakers and decision-makers the key issues of importance for the forest sector. In this study, an attempt is made to combine ecological and social (institutional) aspects of biodiversity conservation in the forest policy process. The methods, experiences and general knowledge from the relevant fields are combined in designing and applying a simple-to-use toolbox for facilitating the process of biodiversity conservation in the context of forest policy implementation. Forested landscapes in Sweden, Lithuania and Komi Republic in Russia served as study area for this dissertation. The integrated toolbox developed in this dissertation provides an example of and a framework for evaluation and facilitation of biodiversity conservation in the context of forest policy processes. This set of tools explicitly recognizes the connectedness, complexity, and ideological differences of ecological and social systems, and employs individual features relevant to these systems in an integrated manner to the benefit of facilitating policy implementation. With the use of “two-dimensional gap analyses”, the needs of society in particular landscape can be evaluated in order to ensure the provision of ecological, economic and social functions of forest in an optimal way

Institutional frameworks for sustainability? : a comparative analysis of the forest sectors of Russia and the Baltic States

After the break-up of the Soviet system, the divergence in forest management among Soviet republics became obvious. While the forest sectors of the Baltic States have been fundamentally changed, Russia has not been able to develop an institutional framework that would fit the prerequisites for social-ecological resilience. It is argued that sustainable development requires institutional frameworks that have the capacity to adapt and learn, and thus to treat policies as experiments that are constantly assessed and readjusted. This, however, requires a participatory approach and in this respect the Baltic States are believed to be on a more promising track. Finally, it is concluded that only to the extent that suitable institutional frameworks will be developed will social-ecological resilience be a significant feature of the natural resources management in the former communist countries.Validerad; 2004; 20070207 (keni

Afforestation planning and biodiversity conservation: predicting effects on habitat functionality in Lithuania

Habitat re-creation is one of the multiple faces of biodiversity restoration and encompasses the attempts to reconstruct an ecosystem on severely disturbed sites with little left to restore. Afforestation of abandoned or marginal agricultural land is an important tool for the re-creation of forest ecosystems and re-establishment of functional habitat networks for the maintenance of biodiversity. This study was performed in the context of the Danish-Lithuanian project 'Afforestation of abandoned agricultural land based on sustainable land use planning and environmentally sound forest management'. The study assessed how habitat re-creation as designed in alternative afforestation plans for two administrative regions in Lithuania will affect the functionality of the landscapes for bird species of conservation concern. Spatial analysis of the forest cover was performed under existing and proposed conditions using general landscape ecological principles concerning core and edge habitats as well as nearest-neighbour metrics. The results show that the use of general criteria may result in proportionally negative changes in the availability of some forest habitats relative to changes in total forest cover, thus leading to less significant improvements in the habitats of many naturally occurring (and even protected) species compared to what would be expected from changes in forest cover alone. To solve this dilemma it is suggested that the requirements of focal species and quantitative conservation objectives should be considered in a spatially explicit - each main forest type. It is concluded that to ensure functionality of habitat networks, knowledge and experience from the fields of landscape ecology and conservation biology should be more commonly incorporated into afforestation planningMykolo Romerio universitetasVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŠvietimo akademijaŽemės ūkio akademij