Ecological Restoration across Landscapes of Politics, Policy, and Property
Humanity—society and its institutions—plays a key role in the future viability of the biosphere. Only by managing ourselves, our resource consumption, our waste, our economies and environment as a whole, can we hope to “manage” the environment and its abu
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Ecological Restoration across Landscapes of Politics, Policy, and Property David Brunckhorst
Humanity—society and its institutions—plays a key role in the future viability of the biosphere. Only by managing ourselves, our resource consumption, our waste, our economies and environment as a whole, can we hope to “manage” the environment and its abundant resources toward a sustainable, healthy, and restorative future. Unfortunately, political reelections and the politics of environmental restoration often seem to be at juxtapositions. The fast-moving variables of economics and reelection generally reign supreme over their slower, foundational, and interdependent ecological components (Carpenter and Turner 2001). The scales of time and space and the constituency of voters generally don’t line up, and, as a result, political and ecological concerns are often misinterpreted as rivals rather than essentials.1 Similarly, planning for the development of land and other resource use often conflicts with maintaining ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and ecological restoration requirements. To make matters more confusing, the policies and programs of different government agencies appear to contradict each other. In this chapter, I offer a “big picture” view of politics, policy, and property (the “3Ps”) as they relate to ecological restoration based on a brief discussion of theory and practice stemming from the fields of regional landscape ecology, complex systems, and institutional design. As I see the situation, the challenges for ecological restoration in the social dimension are caught up in the complexities of entwined socialecological systems operating across not just multiple spatial and temporal scales but also multiple operational scales of human institutions of politics, policies, and property.2 Despite these complexities, I believe that environmental restoration and stewardship at all scales are demonstrably possible across the boundaries of politics, policies, and property rights. What is required is a better understanding of how these socioeconomic institutions and practices work in our everyday lives. Politics is all about the formal and informal contests and negotiations of power in, or over, various circumstances, and how and what power or decisions might be shared or not. The realm of politics entails the building of coalitions, the mobilization of power, and the management of public perceptions, opinions, and actions (including voting behavior) as means of achieving strategic objectives. Property is the institutionalized D. Egan (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, 149 The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_11, © Island Press 2011
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p ow er : p o l i t i c s, g o v e r n a n c e , a nd p la nni ng
concept of owning something, inferring exclusivity in that nonowners lack a right of access to or use of that thing (Ostrom 1990). There are a variety of types of property ownership and rules that af
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