A couple of weeks ago, myself and other colleagues at Edinburgh participated in the annual Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) science conference. Some of us have been involved with this programme for a few years, but the research is now reaching exciting levels of maturity, diversity, and a certain scale. For interdisciplinary researchers at the interface of natural and social science, it was an exciting place to be. I want to highlight a few things that struck me over the two days at the conference.
Whether you speak to communities of practitioners or academics about ecosystem services, the common association people will make is about monetary valuation: these concepts give the potential to make an economic case for nature. Whilst I am not opposed to this in principle, and can see the importance of such strategies in particular for people and organisations that advocate for nature, one refreshing thing about the ESPA community is that its members tend to highlight plural and non-economic values of ecosystem services. Such values are perhaps more appropriate for thinking about the ecosystem services that flow directly in to the livelihoods of poor people in the global south: many are not bought and sold, and their importance might be high even though people’s willingness to pay for them is necessarily limited by their means.
The ESPA community is also a refreshing place to be because when you say ‘ecosystem services’ to them, they do not necessarily say ‘payments for ecosystem services’ back to you. While there is much global hype around this policy mechanism, many researchers involved in the ESPA community have had extensive research careers in developing countries. They are keenly aware that from the point of view of the poorest, PES may have little to offer. Policy instruments do not become pro-poor by accident. Rather, it requires sustained attention to everything that perpetuates marginalisation in a local setting, and PES tend not to be motivated towards this objective nor necessarily able to achieve it on the side.
One thing that excited me about the ESPA science conference was the array of methods being used by projects, sometimes achieving impressive opportunities for triangulating different types of social and ecological data. This can tell a more complete story, but more than that, can lead to methodological innovation. One particular example of this was introduced by Katherine Homewood at the closing plenary, telling us about the ‘BEST’ project, which uses a combination of long-standing ethnographic datasets, and more novel methods such as choice experiments and experimental games to understand household (and indeed, intra-household) decision-making related to the management of East African savannas.
In the final panel discussion, we discussed the overarching theme of the conference: trade-offs. We discussed the characteristics that trade-offs take in places where people are directly dependent on ecosystem services. There was the suggestion that all ecosystem services trade-offs are fundamentally social trade-offs. Is this an attempt by social scientists to colonise the social-ecological middle ground, or is this a necessary truth? One thing about ecosystem services concepts that sometimes troubles me is their anthropocentric orientation. However, on the other hand this logic may suggest it is a necessary truth that there is no ecosystem service without a human beneficiary. Hence, every ecosystem service trade-off must be in essence a social trade-off. On this theme, one panelist wrapped up by remembering this quote from C S Lewis:
“What we call man’s [sic] power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.”
Ecosystem Services 