How on Earth : Operationalizing the ecosystem service concept for local sustainability

Sammanfattning: Ecosystem services are co-produced in social-ecological systems. Due to their social-ecological framing, ecosystem services hold the potential to be a concept around which different stakeholders with vested interests in different aspects of landscape management can meet. However, how this potential is to be realized and the ecosystem services concept operationalized for local decision-making needs to be explored further.In this licentiate thesis, focusing on the Helge å catchment, Sweden, I investigate the social-ecological system dynamics underlying current ecosystem services generation in the area. Together with a group of local to regional stakeholders I performed an iterative, participatory ecosystem service assessment, producing three distinct ecosystem service bundles in the study area. The process to produce the ecosystem service bundles helped in creating a common picture of the landscape among the participants. Ecosystem services also emerged as abridging concept around which the diverse set of participants could meet (paper 1). The ecosystem service bundles were then used as the starting point to co-produce a shared system understanding among the participants and though the formulation of a positive vision for the landscape, start a conversation about sustainability transformations. Based on the outputs from the participatory process and two rounds of interviews with the participants, we assessed to what extent these exercises promoted learning about complexity among the participants, fostered resilience thinking and produced usable knowledge for decision-making (paper 2).Throughout this participatory process of exploring system dynamics and positive futures, I believe that I have kept the rich social-ecological nature of the ecosystem service concept intact while at the same time co-developed concrete, usable results to support local decision-making for sustainability. In addition to being a bridging concept in the participatory process, the ecosystem service concept emerged as a valuable pedagogical tool and as a means for the participants to communicate their system understanding to other actors within and outside their own organizations.