Assessing environmental initiatives through an ecosystem stewardship lens

Abstract

Stewardship has been increasingly used in the realm of conservation and sustainable land use as an important pathway for action. Ecosystem stewardship, a specific application of this concept, is an approach for natural resource management, but the lack of empirical examples is a shortcoming to its applicability. With this work, we aimed at investigating whether environmental initiatives taking place in a rural watershed in southeast Brazil can be framed as ecosystem stewardship and, if so, whether they address key social-ecological feedbacks that influence the quality of critical local ecosystem services (water, food production, soil, forests). Drawing on data from direct and participant observation at community and technical meetings, nine unstructured interviews, and gray literature, we demonstrated that three initiatives encompass all elements of ecosystem stewardship to some extent (dual goals of ecosystem resilience and human well-being, integration of processes across scales and emphasis on actions that shape the future). Only one initiative, a multi-stakeholder network, fully entails all elements of ecosystem stewardship. The initiatives overlap in space and time and entail pressing and non-urgent issues, therefore they promote, as a group, complementary ecosystem stewardship practices at various levels in the territory. They also address the key feedbacks responsible for the degradation of water, food production, and soil. Knowledge, relational values, and care are salient ingredients that combine in different ways, shaping each initiative. Our findings suggest that ecosystem stewardship arises from local social-ecological challenges combined with stakeholders' knowledge and understanding of the system dynamics. Collaboration among initiatives can strengthen their effects on undesired feedbacks and enable the design of joint strategies to tackle the erosion of relational values. Actions focusing on reconnecting local communities and forests may safeguard the flux of ecosystem-service bundles on both the short and long term.

Keywords

• ecosystem services
• local knowledge
• natural resource management
• relational values
• rural landscape
• social-ecological feedbacks