Making explicit an Ecosystem Services indicator as a policy instrument

ABSTRACT

Some policy-oriented concepts such as Ecosystem Services (ESS) remain widely utilized, despite obvious difficulties in operationalizing them. How does the concept persist? In a large EU Horizon 2020 project, researchers from different institutes worked together to develop an indicator of the environmental performance of agricultural practices, expressed in terms of ESS. Two observations of this project help to explain how ESS are progressively turned into a socially shared concept that may transform its environment and perpetuate itself. Firstly, the challenges of operationalizing ESS facilitated the formation of a group of researchers dedicated to the concept. As the project advanced, researchers progressively cut ties with the environmental sciences on which ESS are meant to be based. The interpretive flexibility of the ESS concept contributed to shaping the socially shared reality within which it was situated. Secondly, the legal obligations and procedures of the Horizon 2020 project were an essential factor for the constitutive strength of the ESS concept. As a straitjacket, the grant agreement ensured that the project maintained the researcher-indicator relationship. Thus, researchers were persistently oriented towards developing and expanding the ESS concept. This case illustrates how a research project can be formed and maintained around relatively ill-defined concepts in large consortia that are meant to produce policy-relevant science.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecosystem Services indicator
• Horizon 2020 project
• instrumental constituency
• boundary object
• trials of explicitness

Acknowledgements

This research greatly benefited from the detailed and constructive feedback during an internal seminar at the CSI (Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation) in Paris.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

Approval by the Ethics Committee of the KU Leuven was obtained on 13/01/2021, Number: G-2020-2882.

Notes

1 According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) ‘Ecosystem Services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems’. These include provisioning services (food, timber, genetic resources, …), regulating and maintenance services (carbon sequestration, water purification, pollination, erosion regulation, …), and cultural services (such as recreation and spiritual values, CICES 2018). While there has been a recent push to talk of ‘nature benefits to the people’ instead of ESS (Pascual et al., 2017), the latter concept is still widely promoted at the international and local level. For an example of a European Interreg program framed in terms of ESS, see http://project-ecoserv.eu/.

2 More information on the project here: https://www.lift-h2020.eu.

Additional information

Funding

This research would not have been possible without the agreement of the LIFT consortium (Low Income Farming and Territories, European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 770747). This work was supported by Marie Curie Individual Fellowship funding, NatUVal project [grant number 101024184].

Notes on contributors

Kewan Mertens

Kewan Mertens is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation. He obtained his PhD at the division of Bioeconomics, KU Leuven, in 2018. As a post-doctoral researcher, he sets up transdisciplinary collaborations in Science and Technology Studies (STS) with researchers in the environmental sciences and environmental economics to productively problematize the epistemologies of these disciplines.

Kato Van Ruymbeke

Kato Van Ruymbeke is a post-doctoral researcher at the Division of Bioeconomics, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven.

Liesbet Vranken

Liesbet Vranken is an associate professor at the Division of Bioeconomics, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven. Within the Division, she is the head of research group Society-Environment Interactions.