The review identifies a continuing gap between theoretical discussion of urban ecosystem services and their implementation in landscape design. Cultural ecosystem services are described in the reviewed literature as non-material benefits obtained through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, leisure and aesthetic experiences.

Earlier assessments cited by the authors had found no indicators specifically addressing cultural services in urban ecosystems. A broader review of cultural ecosystem service indicators concluded that many had unclear definitions, objectives or processes for measuring the phenomena of interest.

To develop the framework, the researchers reviewed earlier theories, frameworks and applied studies, then assembled indicators from work concerning aesthetic services and related ecosystem processes. The method was adapted from research on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity.

The researchers did not calculate the assembled indicators because many source studies had specified assessment methods only implicitly or had presented them in limited form. The indicators were classified as qualitative, quantitative or financial. Qualitative indicators describe ecosystem quality and relationships between ecosystems and social or economic flows on a spatial scale. Quantitative indicators represent expected increases or decreases in ecosystem-service processes associated with a policy, while financial indicators concern the monetary value of selected services or changes in their provision under different scenarios.

The proposed framework has three stages. First, planners determine relevant goals and services, define the design scale and consider ecological, economic and socioeconomic objectives. These objectives may overlap rather than remain entirely separate, and priorities can be specified through policy plans or participation by experts and stakeholders.

Second, candidate solutions are filtered according to intervention priorities, planning and management requirements, technology, financing, environmental conditions and demographic-social needs. Third, planners use questions and indicators to analyze primary solutions and compare them across ecological, economic and socio-cultural dimensions, helping identify options for further evaluation and implementation.

Indicator selection is intended to support specified, measurable, accepted, realistic and time-specific objectives. The authors also identify reproducibility, scientific meaning, practical perception, monitoring over time and cost-effectiveness as relevant qualities. Stakeholder participation is important both in defining cultural services and in choosing indicators.

Most assembled indicators were qualitative or quantitative, while financial indicators for cultural ecosystem services were comparatively underdeveloped. Indicators for sensory dimensions beyond the visual were also limited, and biological coverage centered largely on plants and, to a lesser extent, birds. The framework is presented as a screening and structuring tool rather than a complete measurement system.

Its limitations include the absence of calculated indicator values, incomplete assessment methods in the source literature, and an unsuitability for the post-implementation stage because available indicators were spatially limited and carried uncertainty. The authors call for assessment methods proportionate to the indicators, broader coverage of human senses and landscape elements, and fuller integration of relevant factors into urban landscape design.

Subject of Research: A literature-derived framework for incorporating cultural ecosystem services into urban landscape design.

Article Title: Practical framework for cultural ecosystem service in urban landscape design

Article References: Shahali, H., & Habibi, A. (2023). Practical framework for cultural ecosystem service in urban landscape design. One Ecosystem, 8, Article e94561. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.8.e94561

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.8.e94561

Keywords: cultural ecosystem services, urban landscape design, literature review, environmental indicators, urban planning, landscape assessment, ecosystem services, stakeholder participation, Practical, framework, cultural, ecosystem

The proof-of-concept study examined Triglav National Park, Škocjan Caves Regional Park, Kozjansko Regional Park, Goričko Landscape Park and Logar Valley Landscape Park. Representatives of each protected area selected a nearby non-protected reference area intended to be similar in natural conditions. The analysis measured the potential supply of ecosystem services rather than their actual use or demand.

Five participatory workshops were held from October 2022 to May 2023 with local and, in some cases, regional and national stakeholders. Participants allocated stickers to a shortened list of 39 services derived from the international CICES classification. This produced local rankings for the protected areas and most reference areas; stakeholders associated with Triglav National Park did not prioritise services in its geographically distant reference area.

A May 2023 panel involving park representatives, the Institute of the Republic of Slovenia for Nature Conservation, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Spatial Planning and the research team selected forage provision, pollination, and recreation and leisure for further assessment. The choice reflected stakeholder rankings, feasibility and data availability rather than representing a complete inventory of ecosystem services.

Forage provision was estimated with a GIS-based model of annual grassland biomass increments, adjusted for rainfall, slope and insolation. Pollination was assessed instead through a virtual group evaluation in which biologists, the project team, park representatives and institutional experts jointly assigned ecosystem scores from zero to five. Recreation and leisure was represented by a GIS-based recreational attractiveness index combining naturalness, proximity to water, land-use diversity, terrain ruggedness and peaks.

All three services were mapped, but missing geospatial data prevented some features, including hedgerows, gardens and ponds, from appearing on the maps. Protected and reference areas were compared pairwise using area-weighted indicator values and non-parametric statistical tests. The analysis covered only three services and did not address changes over time, economic valuation, demand or use.

Stakeholders generally ranked provisioning and cultural services above regulating services in both types of area. Water for drinking received the highest score among protected areas, while recreation and leisure ranked highest among the reference areas. The widely dispersed allocation of stickers limited the ability to distinguish the most critical services, particularly in the workshop with the largest attendance, suggesting that selection and prioritisation should be conducted in separate rounds.

Pollination capacity was higher in four protected areas and lower in one, while recreation and leisure capacity was higher in four protected areas and higher in the reference area at Triglav National Park. For forage provision, capacity was higher in one protected area, lower in three and not significantly different in one. These pairwise contrasts do not establish that protection caused the differences, and the results could differ if other ecosystem services had been selected.

The study had important limitations. Stakeholder groups, comparison-area sizes and local implementation varied among sites, potentially introducing bias, while workshops may have favoured people with the strongest interests. Data scarcity required approximations and influenced service selection, and time constraints prevented a fuller analysis of demand and use. The resulting comparisons are therefore partial, and conservation managers continued to regard some ecosystem-service work as unnecessarily complex or as potentially commodifying nature.

Subject of Research: Participatory assessment of ecosystem-service supply in Slovenian protected areas and nearby comparison areas

Article Title: Challenges related to stakeholder involvement in the assessment of ecosystem services in protected areas in Slovenia

Article References: Šmid Hribar, M., Japelj, A., Rac, I., Vurunić, S., & Ribeiro, D. (2025). Challenges related to stakeholder involvement in the assessment of ecosystem services in protected areas in Slovenia. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e163691. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e163691

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e163691

Keywords: ecosystem services, protected areas, stakeholder participation, Slovenia, participatory mapping, pollination, recreation, forage provision, nature conservation, Challenges, related, stakeholder

The review synthesises existing literature and the authors’ experience with European floodplain assessments rather than generating new empirical data. It focuses on the River Ecosystem Service Index, or RESI, which was developed in Germany to assess 18 provisioning, regulation and maintenance, and cultural ecosystem services, and on its international extension through the IDES project, which provides schemes for 26 services in the Danube River Basin. Both approaches classify the performance of individual services on a five-level scale and allow results to be mapped for floodplain segments between 1 and 10 kilometres wide.

Floodplains are described as hotspots of regulating services, including flood-risk reduction, drought regulation, nutrient retention, sediment regulation, cooling and carbon sequestration. They can also supply provisioning services such as drinking water, fish, agricultural products and plant biomass, as well as cultural services including recreation, knowledge systems and cultural heritage. Natural heritage is also identified as a common ecosystem service, rather than a service unique to wetlands. The provision of floodplain-specific and high-performing services depends strongly on river pulses and is generally greater in intact or restored floodplains than in degraded ones.

The reviewed nature-based solutions include conserving functioning rivers and floodplains, relocating dykes, removing embankments and allowing channels to meander, reconnecting oxbow lakes and flood channels, restoring extensive grassland and forest use, removing weirs, retaining or adding river wood, stopping drainage and widening river channels. These measures can re-establish hydro-morphological processes and longitudinal, lateral, vertical and temporal connectivity. Reported effects vary by service and site: restoration may support several regulating and cultural services while reducing arable crop production or plant biomass under changed hydrological conditions.

At basin scale, the review evaluates 14 ecosystem services across the 817,000-square-kilometre Danube River Basin using IDES and examines their association with eight standardised indicators of human pressure. The MuFu multi-functionality index compares services scoring below 4 with those scoring 4 or 5. Lower and middle Danube floodplains showed the greatest multi-functionality, supporting priority for conservation, while parts of the Yantra, Tisza and upper Danube had lower scores and greater scope for pressure mitigation. Land-use intensity, impoundments and river morphological alteration showed the strongest relationships with assessed service performance, although their effects varied regionally. The analysis identifies associations rather than establishing that every pressure directly caused the observed pattern.

At regional scale, the River Nebel case compares conditions before restoration with those after interventions conducted from 1990 to 2016. About 22 kilometres of river and floodplain were restored at a cost exceeding €7 million. Using RESI, the review reports that 35 of 43 one-kilometre segments showed increased performance in the evaluated services, and the summed score for seven regulating services rose by as much as 17 points. The assessed changes included an approximately 17% increase in flood-retention area, equivalent to about 119,000 cubic metres of water, a nearly 20% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from formerly intensively used peatland soils, and more than 12% greater cooling capacity of water bodies and soils.

The Nebel assessment also illustrates the review’s limitations. It relied on different databases for the 1990 and 2016 conditions, evaluated no provisioning services, and could not attribute every change to restoration; declining water levels in some peatland areas, for example, were associated with climate effects and sedimentation independent of the project. Monetary estimates also depended on replacement-cost and damage-cost assumptions. Under the cited methods, reductions in flood risk and greenhouse-gas emissions were estimated to amortise the approximately €7 million investment within four to 10 years, but the result varied with the damage-cost approach used.

At local scale, the Koviljsko-Petrovaradinski Rit reserve in Serbia covers 5,886 hectares on both banks of the Danube near Novi Sad. More than 40 stakeholders helped identify ten priority ecosystem services, five important pressures and five potential mitigation measures, then co-designed status-quo, ideal and realistic “optimal” scenarios. A fuzzy cognitive model mapped relationships among services, pressures and measures. The study found low availability of four selected services under current conditions. The ideal scenario improved all assessed services to good or very good conditions, while the jointly designed optimal scenario also improved them while accounting for differing stakeholder needs, rights and preferences.

Overall, the review concludes that standardised ecosystem-service assessments can help planners compare locations and scenarios, prioritise conservation, restoration or pressure reduction, monitor restoration outcomes and identify synergies and trade-offs. Their usefulness depends on matching the spatial scale and resolution to the decision, integrating local participation, conserving functioning floodplains and addressing competition among agriculture, urban development, infrastructure, flood protection and navigation. The authors caution that no single assessment or measure is universally appropriate: the appropriate nature-based solution depends on the project’s objectives and its ecological, socio-economic and hydrogeomorphological context.

Subject of Research: Review of non-monetary ecosystem-service assessment for nature-based management of European river floodplains

Article Title: Assessing ecosystem services across scales to support nature-based solutions in river floodplains: a review of non-monetary tools

Article References: Stammel, B., Jähnig, S. C., Mehl, D., Pusch, M., Srđević, Z., Tschikof, M., Wulf, S., & Scholz, M. (2026). Assessing ecosystem services across scales to support nature-based solutions in river floodplains: a review of non-monetary tools. Nature Conservation, 62, 95-119. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.62.148716

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/natureconservation.62.148716

Keywords: river floodplains, ecosystem services, nature-based solutions, non-monetary assessment, Danube River Basin, River Nebel, floodplain restoration, multi-functionality, stakeholder participation, wetland management, Assessing, ecosystem

The study, led by Thu Thuy Pham with Thi Kim Hong Tang and Thi Minh Duyen Ngo, takes an approach that is refreshingly grounded. Rather than simply auditing policy documents for the presence of gender language, the researchers gathered perspectives from the people who actually have to make the policies work: officials in government agencies, and women, men, and youth living and working within the food system itself. This stakeholder-centered design allows the analysis to capture something that desk reviews routinely miss—the lived experience of implementation, where budgets, social expectations, and local institutional capacity collide with national ambition.

The technical framing of the research matters. Climate-smart agriculture, as a concept, rests on three pillars: sustaining or increasing agricultural productivity, strengthening resilience to climate shocks, and reducing or removing greenhouse gas emissions where possible. A food system that pursues these goals without attending to gender equity is, the authors argue, structurally incomplete. Women in Vietnam’s agricultural regions carry substantial responsibility for cultivation, livestock care, post-harvest handling, and household food security, yet they often have less access to the training, credit, land tenure, and technology that determine who can adopt low-emission practices. When extension services, financing schemes, and emissions-reduction projects fail to reach women, the result is a double failure: the equity goal is missed, and the emissions goal is undermined because half of the potential adopters of improved practices are effectively excluded.

The findings paint a picture of genuine but uneven progress. Vietnam has, by regional standards, made notable strides in writing gender considerations into its food system strategies. Gender mainstreaming language appears in national plans, and there is institutional recognition that women’s leadership, participation, and visibility in climate-smart agriculture are legitimate policy objectives. This is not a trivial achievement. Many countries still treat gender as an afterthought appended to agricultural policy, if it appears at all. Vietnam’s policy texts acknowledge that a low-emission food system cannot be built on the labor and knowledge of only half the population.

Yet the transition from text to transformation is where the system strains. The research identifies four persistent and interlocking challenges. The first is money: funding for gender-responsive implementation is limited, which means that even well-designed policies arrive at the local level without the resources needed to run training programs, adapt extension materials, or support women’s participation in decision-making forums. Budget lines that exist on paper often prove too thin, too rigid, or too short-lived to change outcomes on the ground.

The second challenge is social norms, and it may be the most intractable. Entrenched expectations about who leads meetings, who controls income, who speaks in public, and who owns land continue to shape participation in agricultural programs long after formal rules have changed. A policy can guarantee women a seat at a cooperative meeting, but if the meeting is scheduled at a time that conflicts with unpaid care work, if speaking up carries social cost, or if the chairmanship remains de facto male, the guarantee is hollow. The study’s attention to youth as well as women reflects a related concern: younger farmers, who will manage Vietnam’s food system for decades, face their own barriers to visibility and influence, and their exclusion compounds the gender disparities documented among adults.

The third challenge is the adequacy of policy design itself. The researchers find inadequate attention to women’s specific needs within programs that nominally include them. This is a subtle but critical failure mode in gender mainstreaming. Adding the word gender to a strategy document does not automatically translate into interventions that reflect how women access information, what time constraints they face, which technologies they can realistically operate or finance, or what risks they bear when adopting new practices. Without that specificity, participation becomes nominal—women attend, but the program is not built for them, and adoption of climate-smart practices lags.

The fourth challenge is vertical alignment, the connective tissue between national policy and local execution. The study documents weak alignment between what is designed in ministries and what is implemented in provinces, districts, and villages. Local actors may lack clarity about gender objectives, lack the mandate to pursue them, or lack the coordination mechanisms to work across agencies. In the worst cases, national and local efforts pull in different directions, dissipating scarce resources. The authors emphasize that strengthening institutional coordination is not bureaucratic housekeeping; it is a precondition for equitable, low-emission outcomes, because fragmented institutions cannot deliver coherent support to farmers.

The cumulative consequence of these four challenges is measurable in human terms: gender disparities in knowledge and participation persist, and they directly hinder the effectiveness and equity of climate-smart agriculture policies and projects. Knowledge disparities matter because low-emission practices—improved nutrient management, reduced burning of crop residues, more efficient livestock systems, water-saving techniques—depend on farmers knowing what the practices are, why they work, and how to implement them. Participation disparities matter because practices adopted without women’s input are less likely to fit the realities of the households and farms where women do much of the work. The research thus reframes gender equity not as a moral accessory to climate policy but as a functional requirement for achieving emissions goals in agriculture.

What distinguishes this study is its prescription. The authors argue for participatory, locally driven approaches as the mechanism that can close the policy-practice gap. In practical terms, that means designing interventions with communities rather than for them, ensuring that women and youth help define priorities, shape the design of training and financing, and hold visible roles in implementation and monitoring. It means investing deliberately in gender-sensitive implementation—budgets, personnel, and metrics that track whether women are actually benefiting, not merely attending. And it means building the institutional coordination that lets national gender commitments survive the journey to the village. For a country that has positioned itself as a leader in both agricultural transformation and climate ambition, Vietnam’s experience offers a lesson with global resonance: the hardest distance in food system policy is the last mile between the ministry and the field, and it is a distance that only inclusive, well-funded, locally grounded implementation can cross.

Subject of Research: Gender-responsive implementation of low-emission climate-smart agriculture policy in Vietnam's food system

Article Title: From policy to practice: Advancing a gender-responsive, low-emission food system in Vietnam

Article References: Pham, T. T., Tang, T. K. H., & Ngo, T. M. D. (2026). From policy to practice: Advancing a gender-responsive, low-emission food system in Vietnam. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(7), e0000254. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000254

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000254

Keywords: Vietnam, gender equity, climate-smart agriculture, food systems, low-emission agriculture, policy implementation, gender mainstreaming, women farmers, stakeholder participation, institutional coordination, sustainability, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

The study, published open access on 6 October 2026, set out to answer two questions that have haunted urban policy debates for a decade. First, what are the key trends and knowledge gaps in the existing literature on smart cities and resilience? Second, how can resilience be embedded into the smart city framework so that it genuinely contributes to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals? To answer these questions, the team conducted a Systematic Literature Review covering publications from 2015 to 2026, applying the PRISMA criteria to ensure rigorous, transparent screening of the evidence base.

The methodological toolkit is as notable as the findings. The researchers drew on publications indexed in Scopus, one of the largest curated databases of peer-reviewed literature, and analyzed the corpus using two specialized bibliometric platforms: VOSviewer, which maps co-occurrence networks of keywords, authors and citations, and RStudio with the Biblioshiny package, which provides statistical and visual analysis of publication trends. This combination allowed the team to move beyond narrative impressions and quantify how the field has evolved, where research activity clusters, and which conceptual territories remain underexplored.

The central result is deceptively simple but consequential: smart cities that integrate resilience indicators prove more resilient and more sustainable when crises strike, whether those crises are triggered by natural disasters or by the slow-moving pressures of climate change. The mechanism that makes this work, according to the review, is adaptive governance combined with genuine stakeholder participation. In other words, the technology layer of a smart city, its sensors, dashboards and data pipelines, only delivers protective value when it is governed by institutions capable of learning, adjusting and including the communities they serve.

This framing challenges a common failure mode in urban technology programs. Many smart city projects have been built around technology-first logic, procuring platforms and infrastructure before defining the social and institutional capacities needed to use them effectively. The review’s findings suggest that such projects may achieve narrow efficiency gains while leaving the city exposed to shocks. A city can be dense with sensors and still be brittle if its governance cannot absorb disruption, reallocate resources under stress, or draw on local knowledge during emergencies. Resilience indicators, the authors argue, provide the measurable bridge that turns smart infrastructure into smart, durable urban systems.

The connection to the Sustainable Development Goals is where the study acquires its policy urgency. Goal 11 explicitly links sustainability, resilience and inclusiveness in the urban context, yet the researchers found that these dimensions are often treated separately in practice and in the literature. Smart city initiatives tend to be evaluated on innovation and service delivery metrics, while resilience is assessed through disaster risk reduction frameworks that rarely engage with digital governance. By introducing conceptual and integrated resilience indicators, the study offers a way to evaluate smart cities against the full breadth of Goal 11 rather than a fragment of it, deepening theoretical understanding while giving practitioners a practical yardstick.

For stakeholders, the practical implications are concrete. City governments can use integrated resilience indicators to audit existing smart city programs, asking whether data systems support early warning, whether infrastructure planning accounts for climate projections, and whether marginalized communities participate in decision-making rather than merely receiving services. International development agencies and national governments can incorporate resilience metrics into funding criteria for urban digitalization, steering investment toward projects that strengthen adaptive capacity. The authors position the framework as a tool for constructing systems that are simultaneously sustainable, smart and resilient, a triple test that few current initiatives were designed to pass.

The review also maps the intellectual geography of the field. By covering more than a decade of Scopus-indexed publications, the analysis identifies where scholarly attention has concentrated and where the gaps lie. The identification of knowledge gaps matters because the smart city literature has grown explosively since 2015, producing a sprawling, fragmented body of work spanning engineering, public administration, environmental science and urban planning. Bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Biblioshiny allow researchers to see through this fragmentation, revealing the conceptual clusters that dominate the conversation and the silences, such as the historically thin integration of resilience thinking, that the field has overlooked.

Geographically, the research team itself reflects the global south perspective that is increasingly central to urban resilience debates. With authors based at the Jusuf Kalla School of Government at Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, the E-Governance and Sustainability Institute in Indonesia, the ASIAN Research Institute for Corporate Governance at Universiti Utara Malaysia, and Mindanao State University in the Philippines, the study emerges from regions where exposure to disasters, rapid urbanization and digital transformation intersect most acutely. Cities in Southeast Asia and similar regions face some of the world’s highest climate and disaster risks while simultaneously pursuing aggressive smart city agendas, making the integration of resilience not an academic luxury but an operational necessity.

The broader takeaway is a reframing of what makes a city genuinely smart. The review suggests that intelligence without adaptability is a false economy: a smart city earns its name not by the density of its technology but by its capacity to anticipate, absorb and recover from shocks while continuing to serve all its residents. Resilience, embedded through measurable indicators, adaptive governance and stakeholder participation, is presented as the vital link that transforms smart city investments into progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. As cities worldwide confront intensifying climate hazards and accelerating digitalization at the same time, the study offers both a warning and a roadmap, arguing that the two agendas must be designed together from the start rather than bolted together after the first crisis exposes the gap.

Subject of Research: Integrating resilience into smart city initiatives to advance the Sustainable Development Goals

Article Title: The integration of resilience in smart city initiatives for sustainable development goals

Article References: Winarso, U. T., Purnomo, E. P., Amran, N. A., & Miguel, I. S. (2026). The integration of resilience in smart city initiatives for sustainable development goals. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04626-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04626-3

Keywords: smart cities, resilience, sustainable development goals, SDG 11, adaptive governance, systematic literature review, PRISMA, VOSviewer, bibliometrics, climate change, urban policy, stakeholder participation

The Racha Islands, comprising the larger inhabited Racha Yai and the uninhabited Racha Noi, lie roughly 21 to 25 kilometers south of Phuket in the Andaman Sea. The protected area covers 375.359 square kilometers of water, reef and coastline, and sits in one of Thailand’s most intensively visited marine tourism destinations. Every day, flotillas of dive boats, snorkeling charters and recreational vessels converge on the islands’ fringing coral reefs. The park was created under Section 22 of Thailand’s Act on the Promotion of Marine and Coastal Resources Management, with the ministerial notification published in the Royal Thai Government Gazette on 13 March 2023. Crucially, the notification expires after five years, adding a layer of urgency to the question of whether management can mature quickly enough to justify renewal.

To evaluate the young park, researchers from Mahidol University and Thailand’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources applied the International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Commission on Protected Areas management effectiveness framework, one of the most widely used auditing tools in global conservation. They adapted indicators from the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool and a marine scorecard developed for the World Bank, producing a battery of 43 indicators spanning six components of the management cycle: context, planning, inputs, process, outputs and outcomes. Evidence was compiled between May and October 2025 through document analysis, questionnaire surveys and interviews with 69 respondents, including 50 local resource users and tourism stakeholders and 19 institutional respondents, along with field observations and available ecological monitoring data. Each indicator was scored on a four-point scale, with component scores calculated as percentages of the maximum possible total.

The results paint a picture of a protected area whose legal skeleton is strong but whose operational muscle is thin. The context component, which measures the legal, institutional and threat-related foundation for management, scored highest at 73.3 percent. Awareness among surveyed users was substantial: 60 percent identified the park’s habitat function, 48 percent recognized its importance for marine tourism, and more than 90 percent acknowledged ongoing threats to marine and coastal resources. The outputs component followed at 66.7 percent, with more than 75 percent of planned activity categories implemented on schedule, including mooring-buoy installation, surveillance patrols, underwater clean-ups, coral restoration and public-awareness campaigns. In other words, the park is doing things, not just declaring them.

But the component scores fell away sharply where resources matter most. Inputs, which capture financing, staffing, equipment and information, received the lowest score of just 33.3 percent. At the time of the assessment, the Protected Area Management Centre responsible for the park had only six staff members to cover island-based fieldwork, vessel operations, patrols, technical tasks and administration. Of the Centre’s two patrol vessels, one required repair and the other, the only operational boat, suffered frequent breakdowns. The temporary island office was not fully functional. The management budget depended entirely on annual government allocations with no secure multi-year financing, and while ecological baseline information existed, socio-economic baseline data were absent entirely. The process component, reflecting how management actually operates day to day, scored 48.5 percent, hampered by reactive maintenance, uncertainty about enforcement procedures and an advisory committee, appointed in March 2025, that had not yet held a single meeting.

Planning occupied an intermediate position at 58.3 percent, and here the study uncovered a subtle but consequential failure. A general five-year management plan covering 2024 to 2028 provided strategic direction across administration, monitoring, enforcement, reef conservation and stakeholder participation, and the park’s three management zones reflected reef locations, coastal habitats and differentiated use controls. Yet the plan’s objectives lacked quantitative targets and measurable outcome indicators, and stakeholder participation existed mainly on paper. Local users and tourism operators had been consulted during the park’s designation but played no substantive role in preparing either the five-year plan or the annual implementation plan for fiscal year 2025. The indicator measuring participation in planning received a score of zero, a deliberate distinction between including participation in policy documents and actually involving people in decisions.

The outcomes component, arguably the most important measure of whether any of this effort is working, scored 55.6 percent with evidence that was distinctly uneven. Most surveyed users perceived the overall level of threats as broadly unchanged. Ecological monitoring indicated stable or improving conditions at several reef sites but deterioration at others, meaning no park-wide trend could yet be established. Most respondents reported little change in income or related socio-economic conditions, and without a pre-designation baseline, researchers cannot attribute any observed change to the park’s management. Self-reported compliance was high at 83.7 percent, and more than 80 percent of surveyed users expressed satisfaction with management and enforcement, but recurring violations such as anchoring on coral reefs and fish feeding persisted. Fewer than half of institutional respondents demonstrated a solid understanding of the management plan itself, an internal knowledge gap that bodes poorly for coordinated implementation.

These findings resonate with a growing global literature on the gap between protected-area designation and protected-area performance. Research has repeatedly shown that legal designation alone does not ensure effective conservation when staffing, funding, enforcement and monitoring remain inadequate, and recent analyses indicate that marine protected areas at an actively managed stage achieve stronger ecological outcomes than those that have merely reached initial implementation. The Racha Islands assessment deliberately avoids the harsher label of paper park, since genuine management activities have followed legal establishment. Instead, the authors characterize it as an early-stage protected area in which implementation has advanced faster than the capacity to demonstrate its effects, a distinction that matters for the intensifying global debate over whether rapidly expanding marine protection coverage delivers real conservation.

Tourism emerges from the study as both the park’s greatest challenge and a potential source of strength. Diving and tourism groups already contribute to mooring-buoy work, underwater clean-ups and conservation initiatives, supplementing the government’s limited capacity, and evidence from the Great Barrier Reef shows such partnerships can mature into genuine site stewardship. But recurring pressures from anchoring, fish feeding, physical contact with corals and intensive vessel traffic suggest that zoning and mooring buoys are not enough without better communication of spatial rules and consistent enforcement. The authors argue that tourism operators should be treated as management partners rather than merely regulated users, through structured arrangements for operator briefings, violation reporting and collaborative monitoring. Notably, the study could not assess whether signage and operator briefings actually reach the transient international tourists who dominate visitation, leaving a significant blind spot for future research.

The path forward, according to the researchers, lies in predictable financing, adequate staffing and equipment, a site-specific management plan developed through meaningful participation, and a feasible set of measurable indicators tied directly to management objectives. Encouragingly, some institutional responses have already followed: the advisory committee held its first formal meeting in Phuket in July 2026, and the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources has begun preparing the site-specific plan required under Clause 13 of the designation notification, using the assessment findings to inform the process. Whether these steps translate into demonstrable reef recovery and community benefit remains an open question that only sustained monitoring can answer. For now, the Racha Islands offer a candid early benchmark for the hundreds of newly declared marine protected areas across Southeast Asia’s tourism-dependent coastlines, a reminder that protecting ocean biodiversity is less about drawing boundaries on maps and more about building the institutions capable of defending what lies inside them.

Subject of Research: Management effectiveness of the newly established Racha Islands Marine Protected Area in Phuket, Thailand

Article Title: Bridging the Gap Between Legal Designation and Management Outcomes: Evidence from a Newly Established Marine Protected Area in Thailand

Article References: Satumanatpan, S., Praisankul, S., Chankum, P., Singin, P., & Pantorn, T. (2026). Bridging the Gap Between Legal Designation and Management Outcomes: Evidence from a Newly Established Marine Protected Area in Thailand. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02622-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02622-x

Keywords: marine protected areas, Thailand, coral reefs, IUCN-WCPA framework, management effectiveness, marine tourism, Phuket, ocean conservation, protected area governance, stakeholder participation, Andaman Sea, environmental management

The research, led by Britt van Zelst of Wageningen University & Research and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, together with colleagues from Wageningen, Radboud University, and NIOO-KNAW, responds to a stubborn problem in wildlife management. Human–wildlife conflicts are rarely just about animals. Instead, they reflect the diverse and often competing ways people perceive, value, and relate to nature. Some see beavers as intrinsically valuable creatures with a right to exist; others prize them as providers of flood control, water storage, and water purification; still others experience them primarily as burrowers undermining dikes or dammers flooding farm fields. Because these underlying values frequently go unspoken, disagreements harden into conflicts that damage both people and wildlife.

The Beaver Futures Framework draws directly on the Nature Futures Framework developed under the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which distinguishes three positive value perspectives on nature: nature for nature, nature for society, and nature as culture. The BFF adapts these into four beaver-specific corners. ‘Beavers for Nature’ captures the intrinsic value of beavers, both for their own sake and as keystone ecosystem engineers whose dams, lodges, channels, and burrows create wetlands that shelter plants, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals. ‘Beavers for Society’ emphasizes instrumental benefits such as flood mitigation, drought buffering, carbon storage, and improved water quality. ‘Beavers as Culture’ highlights relational values, the meaningful connections people forge through direct encounters with wildlife. Crucially, the fourth corner, ‘Beavers against Society,’ acknowledges the negative side: burrows destabilizing dikes, dams blocking culverts, and flooded croplands and timber stands.

Together these four perspectives form a diamond-shaped space defined by two axes. The polarisation axis runs between instrumental benefits and instrumental damages, revealing whether stakeholders see beavers as net assets, net liabilities, or something in between. The interaction axis runs between intrinsic and relational values, expressing how much direct engagement between people and beavers stakeholders actually want. The researchers emphasize that the corners represent extreme interpretations rather than mutually exclusive categories; the space between them allows for the nuance and overlap that characterize real human attitudes. This design makes the framework immediately usable in participatory settings, from workshops to surveys and focus groups, without requiring technical training in environmental valuation.

To test the framework, the team deployed it during a 45-minute workshop at the symposium ‘Burrowing in Dikes: Water Safety and Ecology,’ held on 28 June 2023 at Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem. The event was organized by STOWA, the Foundation for Applied Water Research; Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management; and the Kenniscentrum Beaver. The 72 participants who joined the workshop represented precisely the professionals who design, execute, and regulate beaver management in the Netherlands: water authority staff, managers of dikes, roads, and railways, nature conservationists, policymakers, and licensing officials. Using the interactive tool Mentimeter, participants first recorded their spontaneous first association with beavers, then identified values for each framework perspective, positioned themselves within the diamond, and finally chose a preferred future from four extreme scenarios.

The results yielded 288 beaver values, of which 166 were unique, spanning both positive and negative dimensions. Participants’ self-placements gravitated on average toward the ‘Beavers for Nature’ corner, suggesting a strong emphasis on beavers’ intrinsic worth among this professional community. On the polarisation axis, most clustered near the center, recognizing both benefits and drawbacks and struggling to weigh them against each other, a finding the authors say underscores the limits of conventional cost-benefit analysis for diffuse, long-term societal gains pitted against localized, immediate damages. When asked to select an ideal future, 65 percent chose local or regional zonation of beaver management, 28 percent preferred beavers everywhere, 7 percent wanted beavers confined to natural areas, and not a single participant chose a future without beavers.

The statistical analysis, corrected for scoring bias through a permutation-based approach with 9,999 permutations, revealed something subtler. While the overall distance between participants’ first associations and their self-placements was only marginally significant, the axis-specific test found a significant shift along the interaction axis, with self-placements indicating a preference for less interaction with beavers than initial associations suggested. The researchers interpret this convergence as evidence of mutual understanding developing in real time: as participants reflected on values expressed by others, their viewpoints gained nuance. The framework, in other words, did not merely collect opinions; it changed how people thought about the collective space of opinions, revealing shared ground and divergence alike.

The stakes in the Netherlands are unusually high. About one third of the country lies below sea level, and its flood defences are lifelines. Beavers digging burrows into dikes, levees, roads, and bridges pose a genuine public safety risk, while their dams obstruct drainage systems and complicate water management. Conflicts involving so-called problem-beavers have increased significantly over the past decade, and as natural habitats reach carrying capacity, beavers are settling in agricultural and even urban environments. Current management tends to be reactive and short-term, the authors note, because risks are hard to predict and measures are costly, leaving the debate locked in a repetitive argument over beaver pros and cons while the population continues to grow.

What makes the Beaver Futures Framework potentially transformative is its refusal to pick a side. By explicitly legitimizing negative associations alongside positive ones, it allows every stakeholder into the conversation, from flood-safety engineers to rewilding advocates, and prevents any single perspective from dominating. The authors stress that acknowledging damages does not undermine conservation; rather, it supports more realistic pathways of co-adaptation rather than conflict elimination. And because its structure is generic, the framework can be readily adapted to other contentious species, habitats, and ecosystems, from large carnivores returning to Europe’s crowded landscapes to any wildlife whose comeback forces societies to negotiate what living together actually means. In an era when conservation successes keep bringing wildlife back into human-dominated terrain, tools that make plural values visible may prove as important as the ecology itself. The Dutch beaver, once extinct and now divisive, has become the test case for that proposition.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder value perspectives on future human–beaver coexistence in the Netherlands

Article Title: The Beaver Futures Framework: Stakeholder value perspectives on future human–beaver coexistence

Article References: van Zelst, B., Arts, K., Dekker, I., van Wijk, D., Mooij, W. M., & Teurlincx, S. (2026). The Beaver Futures Framework: Stakeholder value perspectives on future human–beaver coexistence. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02476-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02476-x

Keywords: beavers, human–wildlife coexistence, Beaver Futures Framework, Nature Futures Framework, ecosystem engineers, human–wildlife conflict, nature valuation, Netherlands, stakeholder participation, ecosystem services and disservices, rewilding, conservation

The study, published in the journal Ambio, was led by Etienne Quillet of the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale together with Rhoda Fofack-Garcia, Laureline Poisson, and Frida Ben Rais Lasram. Their goal was not simply to describe the seafood industry but to capture its structural complexity, the dense web of interactions linking fish stocks, fishing vessels, processing plants, regulators, markets, technologies, and social norms. To do this, they combined two analytical frameworks that are rarely brought together: the social-ecological network approach, which translates social and ecological elements into nodes and links, and Actor-Network Theory, a sociological perspective that insists non-human entities such as fishing gear, processing technologies, climate change, and even abstract concepts like the market can act as full participants in shaping a system.

The theoretical foundation matters because conventional approaches to social-ecological systems often treat the non-human world passively, as a backdrop against which human actors make decisions. Actor-Network Theory, developed by sociologists Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, flips that assumption. In this view, components are defined by their relationships to other components rather than by their intrinsic characteristics, and material and immaterial objects alike can stabilize or destabilize the network. For a sector as technically saturated as seafood processing, where social and ecological components interact through fishing gear, filleting lines, cold-storage facilities, and regulatory institutions, this perspective offered the researchers a way to include everything stakeholders considered relevant, without imposing rigid predefined boundaries on the system.

Building the network required extensive fieldwork. Between May and July 2024, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews, direct observations, and participatory workshops with a deliberately diverse set of participants drawn from the membership of the regional competitiveness cluster supporting sustainable seafood development: fishing companies and shipowners, primary and secondary processing firms, storage and packaging businesses, traders, maritime colleges, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, certification bodies, unions, and researchers specializing in biology, marine ecosystems, engineering, and logistics. This methodological triangulation, combining multiple data sources, was designed to mitigate the biases inherent in any single method. Interviews capture individual narratives shaped by personal experience; observations and collective workshops add the researchers’ interpretations and the nuances that emerge when participants compare perspectives. The findings were later presented back to stakeholders in a restitution workshop in November 2025 to discuss how the results could inform governance.

The data were analyzed qualitatively using thematic coding in NVivo14, guided by a deceptively simple question: who is responsible for what in relation to seafood products in Boulogne-sur-Mer? The ‘who’ became the nodes of the network, and the ‘what’ became directed links between them. Through iterative, open coding rooted in grounded theory, the team identified a staggering 227 nodes and 595 directed links spanning 49 distinct types of relationship, grouped into nine broad categories: contain, development, influence, integration, production, repercussion, supervision, support, and use. Each category forms a distinct layer of interaction built on the same shared set of nodes, producing what network scientists call a multi-layer network, a structure far richer than the simple social-versus-ecological dichotomy used in most previous studies.

The nodes themselves span four major categories: economic, environmental, productive, and social. They range from aquatic species such as pollock, mackerel, herring, scallop, and the recently abundant squids landed by the local fleet, to the social norms governing seafood consumption, from processing technologies to the regulatory frameworks that govern productive activities. When the researchers visualized the full network, the result was an intricate web almost too dense to interpret directly. But by adjusting the visualization to highlight concentrations of nodes and links, four functional clusters emerged. Cluster 1 represents fishery and aquaculture resources within their ecosystem, connected almost exclusively through ‘contain’ relationships. Cluster 2 corresponds to the operational production of seafood products, bound together by production and use links. Clusters 3 and 4 serve regulatory and organizational functions: the former acts primarily as an influencing force over other components, while the latter channels support toward operational production.

The most consequential finding is structural: operational production entities constitute the core of the network, shaping how environmental resources, economic support, and social regulations are organized around them. Environmental nodes are understood primarily as exploited resources, with their broader systemic dimension, ecosystems, habitats, and unmarketed ecosystem services, remaining marginal. Economic components focus mainly on industrial development support and product promotion, while social components are embedded within the regulatory and normative frameworks governing production. In other words, the entire system reads as production-centric. The researchers argue this reflects a capacity of a limited set of highly connected actors to impose specific interpretive frameworks of sustainability, prioritizing efficiency gains, monitoring tools, and production optimization while marginalizing alternative framings centered on social equity, food sovereignty, and the well-being of coastal communities.

This production-centric structure also raises questions about power dynamics and who gets left out. The network was built from stakeholders recruited through the competitiveness cluster, which facilitated participation but biased it toward well-organized, formal actors, potentially under-representing precarious workers, small-scale fishers outside the cluster, and critical NGOs. Consumers, laborers, and local communities appear weakly connected, suggesting their knowledge, interests, and values are poorly integrated into current governance. The authors propose concrete remedies: creating new nodes, such as organizations representing labor or consumer interests, strengthening their connectivity, reinforcing collaboration between scientific institutions and resource users, and developing participatory interfaces between regulators and local stakeholders. They also recommend expanding the environmental dimension of the network to include habitats, ecosystem services, and biodiversity dynamics, which would support ecosystem-based management in the face of climate change and mounting anthropogenic pressures.

The study is candid about its limits. Generic boundary-interface nodes such as ‘market’ or ‘import’ inevitably conceal a diversity of underlying mechanisms, actors, and geographic contexts, simplifying the complexity of global seafood systems that connect Boulogne-sur-Mer to Norwegian salmon farms, Malagasy shrimp fisheries, Brexit, and resurgent US protectionism. The network is also a snapshot of 2024, though it incorporates drivers of change that give it a dynamic dimension. Future work, the authors suggest, could apply quantitative social network analysis, including centrality metrics and community detection algorithms, information-spreading analyses to trace how disturbances propagate, loop analysis of stabilizing and destabilizing feedbacks, and temporal comparisons to reveal how the network evolves. For now, the map stands as a diagnostic tool: by making visible the underlying structure of interactions and power relations in Europe’s seafood capital, it gives decision-makers an evidence-based foundation for sustainability strategies grounded in the sector’s systemic reality, and identifies the levers, connecting the marginalized, reconfiguring key relationships, and broadening how the environment itself is represented, through which genuine transformation might begin.

Subject of Research: Social-ecological network analysis of the seafood processing sector in Boulogne-sur-Mer using actor-network theory

Article Title: Highlighting the structural complexity of Europe’s leading seafood processing hub: Building a social-ecological network with actor-network theory

Article References: Quillet, E., Fofack-Garcia, R., Poisson, L., & Ben Rais Lasram, F. (2026). Highlighting the structural complexity of Europe’s leading seafood processing hub: Building a social-ecological network with actor-network theory. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02485-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02485-w

Keywords: seafood sector, social-ecological network, actor-network theory, Boulogne-sur-Mer, fisheries, aquaculture, governance, sustainability, supply chain, complex networks, stakeholder participation, marine ecosystems

The argument rests on a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge moves between research, governance, and the public. Traditional models of science–policy interaction assumed a linear pipeline: researchers produce facts, experts distill them into advice, and decision-makers apply that advice to problems. In this view, controversy represents contamination—value-laden disputes intruding on value-free facts. Yet decades of research in science and technology studies have demonstrated that the linear model rarely describes how policy actually works. Food systems are what scholars call wicked problems: they involve multiple legitimate perspectives, deep uncertainty, contested values, and tightly coupled social, ecological, and economic dimensions. No amount of data alone can settle questions such as how much land should be devoted to livestock farming or whether gene-edited crops should fall under the same regulations as transgenic organisms. These questions demand deliberation, and deliberation is inherently contested.

Seen through this lens, controversy is not noise obscuring the scientific signal; it is a signal in its own right. Controversies reveal where public concerns genuinely lie, where evidence is thin or contested, where institutions have lost trust, and where policy frameworks have failed to keep pace with technological or social change. When scientists and scientific advisory bodies retreat from controversy, they leave a vacuum that is quickly filled by less rigorous voices: industry lobbying campaigns, activist absolutism, conspiracy theories, and misinformation. The withdrawal of credible expertise from contested terrain does not depoliticize the debate; it simply removes the most careful participants from it. Conversely, when scientists enter controversies with humility about uncertainty and openness about values, they can elevate the quality of the entire conversation.

Concrete examples abound across the food domain. The prolonged European disputes over glyphosate herbicides, for instance, initially saw scientific assessment agencies produce technically sound but socially tone-deaf evaluations, triggering accusations of capture and conspiracy that eroded trust in regulatory science. Subsequent rounds of assessment placed far greater emphasis on transparency, on independent scrutiny of industry data, and on direct public engagement—an approach widely credited with partially restoring legitimacy even among skeptics. Similarly, debates over Golden Rice and other biofortified crops demonstrated that resistance was often rooted not in ignorance of the science but in legitimate concerns about corporate control of seed systems and the adequacy of technological fixes for problems of poverty and distribution. Researchers and institutions that acknowledged these concerns, rather than dismissing opponents as anti-science, found more productive pathways toward deployment and policy acceptance.

The mechanisms by which engagement strengthens science–policy–society interfaces are increasingly well understood. First, controversy forces articulation. When researchers must defend and explain their findings to skeptical publics, they are compelled to clarify assumptions, expose uncertainties, and distinguish firmly established results from contested interpretations. This process frequently improves the science itself, identifying blind spots and untested assumptions that would otherwise remain hidden. Second, controversy builds trust through visibility. Public trust in science is less a product of deference to authority than of demonstrated reliability, openness, and responsiveness. Scientists who engage critics directly, admit errors when they occur, and update positions as evidence evolves signal these qualities far more effectively than institutions that communicate only through polished consensus documents.

Third, engagement surfaces the value questions that linear models suppress. Questions about food are never purely technical. Whether a society should prioritize yields, environmental resilience, animal welfare, rural livelihoods, or consumer choice is a matter of values, and pretending otherwise breeds cynicism. Structured engagement with controversy allows these values to be named and negotiated explicitly, in formats such as citizen assemblies, deliberative mapping exercises, participatory technology assessment, and multi-stakeholder platforms. In several countries, such deliberative processes have reshaped national food strategies, demonstrating that citizens can grapple responsibly with complexity when given genuine influence and adequate information. Science contributes the evidence base; deliberation weighs the trade-offs; policy reflects the negotiated outcome. Each element is stronger because the others are present.

None of this implies that engagement is easy or risk-free. Scientists who enter contested arenas face harassment, organized campaigns against their reputations, and the temptation to overstate certainty in defense of their position. Institutional incentives, including funding structures and publication metrics, rarely reward time spent on policy engagement or public deliberation. Early-career researchers in particular may fear professional consequences for taking public positions, however carefully qualified. Moreover, engagement can be weaponized: bad-faith actors may exploit scientists’ willingness to debate to manufacture false balance or to launder fringe claims with borrowed credibility. These risks are real, and ignoring them would itself be a failure of rigor.

The response, however, is not withdrawal but strategic and institutionalized engagement. That means equipping researchers with training in communication, negotiation, and the sociology of controversy; providing legal and institutional protection for scientists who face retaliation; building dedicated boundary organizations and knowledge broker roles that mediate between research, policy, and publics; and designing advisory processes that are transparent about whose interests are represented and how value judgments enter assessments. It also means diversifying who speaks for science. Controversies over food disproportionately affect farmers, Indigenous communities, low-income consumers, and food workers, yet these groups are chronically underrepresented in expert panels. Interfaces that incorporate this diversity are not just more legitimate; they are epistemically richer, drawing on experiential and local knowledge that formal science often misses, from farmers’ tacit understanding of soil and weather to community knowledge of food access barriers.

The scholarly case for embracing controversy also carries implications for how scientific institutions measure success. If the goal of science–policy–society interfaces is not merely the transfer of information but the cultivation of shared understanding and durable decisions, then indicators such as citation counts or the volume of policy briefs produced are poor measures of effectiveness. More meaningful metrics include the extent to which advisory processes are trusted by contested stakeholders, whether deliberative outputs actually influence legislation, how controversies evolve over successive episodes, and whether previously polarized positions converge toward workable compromises. Longitudinal studies of food governance suggest that interfaces built on engagement and deliberation are more resilient across political cycles than those built on technocratic authority, which tend to collapse whenever political power shifts against them.

Ultimately, the argument reframes one of the oldest tensions in the relationship between science and society. Food system controversies are not temporary disruptions on the road to a settled consensus; they are permanent features of democratic governance over matters that touch everyone, three times a day. A science system that treats them as threats will retreat into irrelevance, ceding the terrain to those least equipped to navigate complexity. A science system that treats them as opportunities—moments to clarify, to listen, to deliberate, and to rebuild trust—can transform conflict into a generative force for better policy and a more food-secure, sustainable, and equitable world. The evidence increasingly suggests that the second path is not merely more virtuous but more effective, and that the future of evidence-informed food governance depends on scientists willing to meet controversy where it lives: in the public square.

Subject of Research: The role of scientists' engagement in food system controversies in strengthening science–policy–society interfaces

Article Title: Engagement in food system-related controversies can strengthen science–policy–society interfaces

Article References: Jackson, L. E., Jarne, P., Shrivastava, P., Ghneim-Herrera, T., Vermeulen, S., Alvarez Pereira, C., Toulmin, C., Saldiva, P. H. N., Thioub, I., Maria Correa, C., Immediato Daien, C., & Caron, P. (2026). Engagement in food system-related controversies can strengthen science–policy–society interfaces. Nature Food, 7(9), 838-844. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-026-01416-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43016-026-01416-y

Keywords: food systems, science policy, controversies, public engagement, deliberation, trust in science, evidence-based policy, food governance, wicked problems, science communication, stakeholder participation, sustainability

The research team, led by Louis Kusi Frimpong of the University of Environment and Sustainable Development in Somanya, Ghana, together with colleagues at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Ghana, set out with three aims. First, they mapped land cover changes and identified the drivers behind them. Second, they examined the conservation practices currently deployed in the wetland and how these practices affect both livelihoods and ecological protection. Third, they investigated whether commons-based governance mechanisms, including trust, participation, and institutional coordination, could improve wetland governance outcomes. The approach reflects a growing recognition in conservation science that satellite data alone cannot explain why landscapes degrade, because the trajectories of ecosystems are inseparable from the institutions, economies, and power relations that shape how people use land.

Technically, the study employed a case study research design that integrates remote sensing with qualitative social science. Satellite imagery spanning roughly thirty years was classified into land cover categories, allowing the team to quantify the conversion of vegetated areas into bare surfaces and to track the spatial pattern of these changes across the wetland complex. The 47 percent vegetation loss and the more than fourfold expansion of bare land are not uniform across the landscape; they cluster around areas of intensive anthropogenic pressure, including expanding settlement, salt mining operations, sand and stone quarrying, and agricultural conversion. The district’s population grew from about 130,795 in 2010 to a combined 152,498 in 2021 across the Ada East and Ada West districts created by an administrative split, and this demographic pressure compounds the direct exploitation of wetland resources.

The interviews, conducted with a broad range of stakeholders, reveal a governance landscape marked by conflicting rationalities. State institutions responsible for wetland protection operate under legal frameworks including Ghana’s Wetland Management (Ramsar Sites) Regulations of 1999 and the Forestry Commission Act of 1999, yet enforcement capacity is limited and land tenure in the area is governed by a complex coalescence of customary ownership and state administration. Community members, for their part, depend on the wetland for fishing, salt production, fodder, and fuelwood, and many perceive conservation restrictions as threats to survival rather than as shared stewardship obligations. Previous work by members of the same team had documented these stakeholder conflicts in detail; the new study shifts the question from who is to blame toward what forms of collective management can actually work on the ground.

The theoretical lens the researchers bring to this question is convivial conservation, an approach developed by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher that proposes humans and nature should thrive together rather than be separated into protected zones and sacrifice areas. Convivial conservation moves away from fortress-style protection, which fences ecosystems off from the people who live in and around them, and toward practices that weave livelihoods and biodiversity into a single, negotiated space. The concept draws intellectual roots from Ivan Illich’s notion of conviviality, from commons scholarship associated with Elinor Ostrom, and from political ecology’s insistence that conservation is never socially neutral. In the Ada-Songhor context, the study finds that convivial practices are not merely theoretical: they emerge concretely in state-community collaborations that blend formal regulation with community-based rules, allowing resource use to continue in negotiated forms while penalizing the most destructive activities.

Central to these collaborations are what the authors describe as commons-based approaches. Drawing on Ostrom’s design principles for governing common-pool resources, the study highlights the roles of trust between communities and state actors, genuine participation in decision-making rather than token consultation, and institutional coordination across the fragmented agencies with jurisdiction over wetlands, fisheries, lands, and local government. The findings show that where these elements are present, communities are more willing to monitor and report destructive practices, to participate in restoration activities, and to accept restrictions on resource extraction. Where trust is absent, enforcement collapses into confrontation, and degradation accelerates. This aligns with a broader empirical literature showing that community monitoring and co-management arrangements improve common-pool resource outcomes across diverse contexts, from forests under REDD+ programs to small-scale fisheries.

The livelihoods dimension is where the study’s findings become particularly demanding. Any conservation regime in the Ada-Songhor wetland must reckon with the fact that salt winning, fishing, and farming are not marginal activities but the economic backbone of households in one of Ghana’s poorer coastal districts. The researchers found that conservation practices succeed when they are socially attuned, meaning they protect livelihood options while excluding the practices that cause the most ecological harm, such as unregulated sand mining and vegetation clearing. This echoes evidence from elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa that wetland degradation directly undermines the livelihoods and wellbeing of the poor, and that restoration programs affect household income and livelihood structure in complex ways. The Ada case suggests that wetland protection and poverty alleviation are not inherently opposed, but reconciling them requires institutional designs that give communities both voice and a stake in outcomes.

The stakes of getting this right extend well beyond one Ghanaian district. Wetlands rank among the planet’s most valuable ecosystems, delivering water purification, flood regulation, carbon storage, and critical habitat for migratory birds and aquatic species, yet they are disappearing faster than almost any other ecosystem type. Across the rapidly urbanizing Global South, wetlands face intense socio-ecological pressure as cities expand, land values rise, and climate change alters hydrological regimes. Ghana’s wetlands, protected on paper under the Ramsar Convention since the 1990s, illustrate a widespread gap between formal designation and effective management. The Ada-Songhor findings contribute to a growing body of scholarship arguing that this gap is best closed not through stricter top-down control alone, but through polycentric governance in which state institutions, customary authorities, and community organizations share responsibility and coordinate their efforts.

The study is not uncritical about the difficulties. The researchers emphasize the socio-ecological and governance complexities of wetland management, noting that even collaborative arrangements must continually negotiate tensions between conservation goals and immediate economic needs, between formal law and customary norms, and between national policy commitments and local realities. Spatial data show that degradation has continued despite existing protections, a reminder that institutional innovation is urgent rather than optional. The authors argue that their findings underscore the benefits of collaborative, well-coordinated, and socially attuned management practices for protecting ecologically sensitive areas, and they call for a renewed sense of ecological stewardship in endangered regions. For the Ada-Songhor wetlands, the message is clear: the landscape’s future will be decided not in a single agency’s office or a village meeting, but in the ongoing, imperfect, and essential negotiations between the people who live from the wetland and the institutions charged with protecting it.

Subject of Research: Wetland land cover change and convivial, commons-based conservation governance in the Ada-Songhor wetland area of Ghana.

Article Title: Negotiating Wetlands: Convivial Conservation and Collective Wetland Management in Ada, Ghana

Article References: Frimpong, L. K., Mensah, S. L., Okyere, S. A., Gbedemah, S. F., & Oteng-Ababio, M. (2026). Negotiating Wetlands: Convivial Conservation and Collective Wetland Management in Ada, Ghana. Environmental Management, 76(9), Article 309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02613-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02613-y

Keywords: Ada-Songhor wetland, Ghana, convivial conservation, wetland governance, commons, land cover change, Ramsar site, community-based management, livelihoods, stakeholder participation, remote sensing, coastal wetlands