Social equity in governance of ecosystem services: synthesis from European treeline areas

Simo Sarkki; Mikko Jokinen; Maria Nijnik; Lyudmyla Zahvoyska; Eleni M. Abraham; Concepción L. Alados; Chloe Bellamy; Svetla Bratanova-Dontcheva; Karsten Grunewald; Jozef Kollar; Ján Krajčí; Apostolos P. Kyriazopoulos; Nicola La Porta; Antonio T. Monteiro; Jose Munoz-Rojas; Taras Parpan; Louise Sing; Mike Smith; Marja-Liisa Sutinen; Anne Tolvanen; Tetiana Zhyla

doi:10.3354/cr01441

Climate Research

via Mailchimp

CR 73:31-44 (2017) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01441

Contribution to the CR Special 34: Resilience in SENSitive mountain FORest ecosystems under environmental change

Social equity in governance of ecosystem services: synthesis from European treeline areas

Simo Sarkki^1,2,*, Mikko Jokinen³, Maria Nijnik⁴, Lyudmyla Zahvoyska⁵, Eleni M. Abraham⁶, Concepción L. Alados⁷, Chloe Bellamy⁸, Svetla Bratanova-Dontcheva⁹, Karsten Grunewald¹⁰, Jozef Kollar¹¹, Ján Krajčí¹², Apostolos P. Kyriazopoulos¹³, Nicola La Porta^14,15, Antonio T. Monteiro¹⁶, Jose Munoz-Rojas⁴, Taras Parpan¹⁷, Louise Sing⁸, Mike Smith⁸, Marja-Liisa Sutinen^18,†, Anne Tolvanen¹⁹, Tetiana Zhyla⁵

¹Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, PO Box 1000, 90014 University of Oulu, Finland
²Thule Institute, PO Box 7300, 90014 University of Oulu, Finland
³Natural Resources Institute Finland, Kolari Office, Muoniontie 21 A, 95900 Kolari, Finland
⁴The James Hutton Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen AB15 8QH, United Kingdom
⁵Institute of Ecological Economics, Ukrainian National Forestry University, Generala Chuprynky Str. 103, 79057 Lviv, Ukraine
⁶Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54006 Thessaloniki (236), Greece
⁷IPE-CSIC, Avda. Montañana 1005, 50080 Zaragoza, Spain
⁸Forest Research, Northern Research Station, Roslin, Midlothian EH25 9SY, United Kingdom
⁹Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research,Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Ecosystem Research Division, 2 Gagarin Street, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
¹⁰Leibniz-Institut für ökologische Raumentwicklung (IÖR) e.V., Weberplatz 1, 01217 Dresden, Germany
¹¹Institute of Landscape Ecology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Štefánikova 3, 814 99 Bratislava, Slovak Republic
¹²Trstené 59, 032 21 Bobrovec, Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovak Republic
¹³Democritus University of Thrace, Department of Forestry and Management of the Environment and Natural Resources, 193 Pantazidoustr., 68200 Orestiada, Greece
¹⁴Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM), Via E. Mach 1, 38010 S. Michele all’Adige, Trento, Italy
¹⁵MOUNTFOR Project Centre, European Forest Institute (EFI), Via E. Mach 1, 38010 S Michele all’Adige, Trento, Italy
¹⁶Research Center on Biodiversity and Genetic Resources (CIBIO), Rua Padre Armando Quintas, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal
¹⁷Ukrainian Research Institute of Mountain Forestry, 31 Hrushevskoho Street, 76018 Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine
¹⁸Natural Resources Institute Finland, Eteläranta 55, 96300 Rovaniemi, Finland
¹⁹Natural Resources Institute Finland, Paavo Havaksen tie 3, 90570 Oulu, Finland

*Corresponding author: simo.sarkki@oulu.fi^†Deceased^‑Advance View was available online February 7, 2017

ABSTRACT: Achieving social equity among local stakeholders should be a key objective for ecosystem service (ES) governance in Europe’s ecologically fragile treeline areas. The ES literature tends to be biased towards distributional equity and market-based instruments when assessing social equity of ES governance. In this study, we analyze a wide range of social equity procedures that have been applied in Europe, using 11 synthesized case studies of governance-related challenges and 75 proposals for governance enhancement from 8 European countries provided by researchers with expertise on treeline area governance. The proposals were grouped by inductive clustering into 10 procedural or distributional equity-related policy recommendations: (1) increase stakeholder collaboration, (2) balance interactions between horizontal and vertical governance levels, (3) increase ES education, (4) use science to guide decisions, (5) start collaboration at an early stage, (6) enhance transparency, (7) aim to mitigate negative impacts, (8) use an ES approach to identify synergistic goals for governance, (9) enhance balanced multi-functional land use, and (10) use market-based instruments to balance benefits and costs deriving from governance decisions. Finally, we discuss 5 more general proposals on how regulatory and market-based approaches could be linked to enhance both procedural and distributional equity of treeline area governance.

KEY WORDS: Governance of ecosystem service · Stakeholders · Land use · Climate change · Social equity · Multifunctional landscapes · Altitudinal/latitudinal treeline

Full text in pdf format

Cite this article as: Sarkki S, Jokinen M, Nijnik M, Zahvoyska L and others (2017) Social equity in governance of ecosystem services: synthesis from European treeline areas. Clim Res 73:31-44. https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01441

Export citation
Share: Facebook - - linkedIn

Cited by

Previous article Next article