Governing public and private rights and responsibilities in multifunctional landscapes

Background/Question/Methods

Environmental governance involves efforts by government and nongovernmental organizations to incentivize, regulate, and produce ecosystem services such as water quality, food and bioenergy production, recreation, and groundwater recharge.  This research applies the examines policies to produce ecosystem services in a Midwestern landscape in order to reveal how public and private rights and responsibilities for ecosystem services are negotiated in policymaking and implementation. To examine the governance of multifunctional landscapes, we asked: 1) How do public policies – including acquisitions, incentives and regulation – frame public and private rights and responsibilities related to bundles of ecosystem services?  2) Does the spatial targeting of ecosystem service policies create multifunctional landscapes at the property, subwatershed, or municipal scale?  The study site is Wisconsin’s Yahara Watershed, which has prominent lakes and a mix of urban and rural landscapes including dairy farms, public forestland, and the state’s second-largest city. We conducted policy content analysis, informational interviews, and spatial analysis of the location of policy implementation efforts with a Geographic Information System.

Results/Conclusions

Content analysis of policies revealed how policy makers frame ecosystem services from public and private lands in order to justify effective use of public funds for diverse public interests.  Despite an emphasis on synergies in policy framing, a Geographic Information System map and spatial cluster analysis of interventions showed that implementation of ecosystem service policies is fragmented across parcels. Parcel-level analysis revealed the clustering of ecosystem service targeting while subwatershed and municipal-level analysis obscured these spatial patterns.  Local leaders and natural resource managers aim to develop landscape-scale production of multifunctional landscapes. However, path dependency and the fragmentation of property rights, policy administration, and interest groups present limits for a technical approach to optimizing landscape function.