Harmonizing Operas Voices. an Investigation of Different Perspectives on the Ecosystem Services Concept and Implications for Research and Practice.

Over the past 150 years, humans have altered the planet at a rapid pace. In this new era, the Anthropocene, environmental degradation has come to a state where sustainable ecosystem management has developed into an urgent quest for humans to maintain their own life-support system. The ecosystem services (ES) concept, initially introduced as potential facilitator to manage this quest, has been criticized for its vagueness to pose a barrier to the concept’s application in practice. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on this vagueness as potential barrier to successful collaboration in the research community (interdisicplinarity) as a precondition to the concept’s application for sustainable ecosystem management (transdisicplinarity).

Focusing on the European research project Operational Potential for Ecosystem Research Applications (OPERAs), the objective is to serve the research community with the identification of differences in conceptual perspectives on ES (differentiation), in order to recommend an effective way of handling these differences (clarification) as a basis for interdisciplinary integration (synthesis). With an emphasis on differentiation and clarification, the research process concentrates on the derivation of a typology of perspectives from the literature (RQ 1), on the basis of which perspectives in OPERAs are assessed with the help of Q methodology (RQ 2) in order to derive implications for how to handle the concept in the future (RQ 3).

The main findings suggest clear differences between three foundational perspectives but a more nuanced variety of viewpoints in OPERAs that can be summarized under five main perspectives. Whereas the notion of interdisciplinarity has often steered the focus towards disciplinary worldviews as the cause for different perspectives, the results point to the insight that perspectives on the ES concept are influenced by a more complex interplay of paradigmatic assumptions. Therefore, clarification is suggested to encompass more than the standardization of discipline-induced worldviews and to require open dialogue on underlying values and ethical stances. In synthesis, the question is not only how to use the ES concept effectively but also to what extent the concept can suffice sustainable ecosystem management in the long-term.