Measuring the intensity of conflicts in conservation.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Cusack JJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8365684 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Social-ecological systems are characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and change. Adaptive co-management may help to improve adaptability and resilience and to develop 'no-regret strategies' for a sustainable management. It is a dynamic, inductive, and self-organized process based on social learning and collaboration. In this regard, conservation conflicts, conflicts between humans about wildlife, are a contemporary environmental management issue. Their management may be facilitated through adaptive co-management. However, adaptive co-management typically emerges because of a crisis or changing context and is difficult to be applied intentionally. We hypothesize that it may be possible to lay the ground for an adaptive co-management process by activating stakeholders to interact experimentally without a prescriptive application of adaptive co-management criteria. We examined conservation conflicts in the context of three German national parks, where we triggered interaction between 68 stakeholders in nine moderated focus groups. These were recorded and analyzed. Stakeholders discussed similar conflict issues and conflict management suggestions. Subsequently, we conducted a literature synthesis, resulting in 13 adaptive co-management characteristics, and analyzed concurrencies between these and stakeholders' management suggestions. Management suggestions reflected collaborative, interactional, structural, and practice-oriented adaptive co-management characteristics, while political context, rules, adaptability, learning, and monitoring were underrepresented. These underrepresented adaptive co-management characteristics may be harder to be recognized by stakeholders. An implementation of stakeholder-based management suggestions may prepare the systems for change. However, policy windows and resilience have to be observed, underrepresented characteristics have to be examined, and political context, long-term support, monitoring, and facilitation have to be considered. The approach fosters conservation conflict solution. The results could help protected area managers to further develop a local process. The experiment empowered stakeholders and resulted in case-specific suggestions, backed up by adaptive co-management literature. Research should focus on bridging knowledge between case studies as well as between politics, management, stakeholders, and scientists and on further examining stakeholders' capabilities to develop adaptive co-management approaches.
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Project description:Large knowledge gaps currently exist that limit our ability to understand and characterise dynamics and patterns of land-use intensity: in particular, a comprehensive conceptual framework and a system of measurement are lacking. This situation hampers the development of a sound understanding of the mechanisms, determinants, and constraints underlying changes in land-use intensity. On the basis of a review of approaches for studying land-use intensity, we propose a conceptual framework to quantify and analyse land-use intensity. This framework integrates three dimensions: (a) input intensity, (b) output intensity, and (c) the associated system-level impacts of land-based production (e.g. changes in carbon storage or biodiversity). The systematic development of indicators across these dimensions would provide opportunities for the systematic analyses of the trade-offs, synergies and opportunity costs of land-use intensification strategies.
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