The issues of assessment and management of ecosystem services have received
increasing attention in recent
years. A number of studies on specific
challenges, institutions, and policies for
agro-ecosystem services have also
appeared. It is recognised that maintaining and improving ecosystem
services requires an effective social order (governance) and coordinated actions at
various levelsindividual, organisational, community, regional, national and
transnational. It is also known that effective forms of governance are rarely universal and
there is a big variation among different ecosystems, regions and countries. Efficiency
of environmental management depends on specific governing structures which
affect individuals behaviour in dissimilar ways, give unlike benefits, command
different costs, and lead to diverse
performances.
Research on mechanisms of governance of agro-ecosystem services is at
the beginning stage due to `newness' of problem, little awareness, emerging
novel challenges, `lack' of long-term experiences, and fundamental modernisation
during the last two decades. Most studies focus on certain hotspots or type
ecosystem (e.g., pastoral) and individual modes (formal, contract, business and public).
What is more, `normative' (to some ideal or external) rather than comparative
institutional approach between feasible alternatives is employed. Likewise, significant
social costs associated with the governance, viz., transaction costs are not taken
into consideration. Furthermore, uni-disciplinary approach dominates, and efforts
of economists, lawyers, ecologists, behavioural and political scientists are rarely
united. Besides, there are little studies on specific natural, economic,
institutional, international, etc., factors responsible for variation among ecosystems,
regions, and countries. Consequently, understanding factors of governance of
ecosystem services is impeded, spectrum of feasible modesinformal, market, private,
public, integral, multilateral and transnationalcannot be identified, and their
efficiency, complementarities, and prospects of development assessed. All these restrict
our capability to assist public policies, and individual, business and collective
actions for effective supply of ecosystem services. |