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The Purpose and Politics of Ecosystem-Based Management

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Sustainability Science

Abstract

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) emerged in the late 1980s as an alternative to the piecemeal, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction approach to natural resource management that dominated the twentieth century. EBM features three central attributes: (1) planning at a landscape scale, (2) collaboration with stakeholders, and (3) adaptive and flexible implementation. According to its proponents, EBM can generate management that is not only ecologically sensitive and responsive to new scientific information but also widely accepted. Application of EBM has yielded some important environmental benefits, including improvements in scientists’ understanding of large-scale ecosystems. Those advances in knowledge, however, have not necessarily translated into the kinds of political and policy changes that the proponents of EBM had hoped for. Nor have they yielded more resilient ecosystems. Instead, in prominent cases of EBM, powerful interests have dominated the collaborative planning process, and flexible implementation has allowed those who are not committed to evade responsibility for implementing environmental sustainability measures. Simply enhancing scientific models to better assess complex risks will not ensure that EBM yields genuine ecological restoration. Also important are a credible and stringent regulatory framework and political leaders who place a premium on ecological integrity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    EBM is just one of the new approaches that emerged at this time. Smaller, more local initiatives constitute what Weber (2003) calls grass-roots ecosystem management (GREM). According to Weber, GREM arises in rural, natural-resource-dependent communities, primarily in the West, in an effort to overcome gridlock in public lands management. The lines dividing different types of initiatives are blurry, and some authors cast a wide net (Gordon and Coppock 1997; Meffe et al. 2002), while others draw a distinction between initiatives that are large scale and often led by government and more ad hoc, small-scale efforts driven primarily by local activists (Cestero 1999). This chapter focuses on large-scale, government-led initiatives former. It also focuses on EBM in the USA, although the concept has taken hold around the world.

  2. 2.

    According to Haeuber (1996), the EBM concept has historical roots that predate the flux-of-nature paradigm in ecology. He notes that in the early 1930s the Ecological Society of America’s Committee for the Study of Plant and Animal Communities recommended protecting ecosystems rather than just species, incorporating natural disturbance regimes into management, and using a core reserve/buffer design approach for natural area protection.

  3. 3.

    Ecological services are the benefits supplied by natural systems; they range from clean air and water to the cycling of nutrients that are essential to life.

  4. 4.

    Haeuber and Franklin (1996) argue that sustainability is at the core of EBM, its essential element and precondition. Franklin (1997) defines sustainability as “the maintenance of the potential of our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to produce the same quantity and quality of goods and services in perpetuity.”

  5. 5.

    While critics on the left suggested that EBM would yield watered-down, and therefore insufficiently protective, solutions, critics on the right argued that EBM was a vehicle of nature-worshipping environmentalists to elevate protection of ecosystems above all else (Fitzsimmons 1999).

  6. 6.

    Elsewhere, EBM went by other names, including Integrated Coastal Management, Integrated Water Resources Management, and Integrated River Basin Management.

  7. 7.

    For analysis, see Layzer (2008).

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  1. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 9-326, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Judith A. Layzer

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  1. PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studie, Montclair State University, Montclair, 70803, New Jersey, USA

    Michael P. Weinstein

  2. Louisiana State University, Nicholson Extension, Baton Rouge, 70803, Louisiana, USA

    R. Eugene Turner

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Layzer, J.A. (2012). The Purpose and Politics of Ecosystem-Based Management. In: Weinstein, M., Turner, R. (eds) Sustainability Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3188-6_9

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