Identifying collaboration gaps and opportunities as key to more accurate science-based assessments of ecosystem service actions in watershed management: application to the Lower Chubut River Valley (Argentina).

OLIVIER T; AIGO J; PASCUAL M; KAREIVA P

Routledge Studies in Ecosystem Services

Routledge

Lugar: California; Año: 2020;

Science-based assessments of ecosystem services are increasingly used to build support for and guide conservation decisions. However, focusing solely on the biophysical aspects of ecosystem services only gets one partway towards conservation success? equally important are the governance structures that constrain those actions. Since natural resources rarely adhere to political jurisdictions, resource management typically requires collaboration amongst often silo?d institutions. This is especially true of watersheds where upstream activities can profoundly impact downstream communities in a unidirectional way. To enrich this general theoretical framework and address an immediate practical problem, we apply social network analysis to assess ecosystem service management actions in regional river management. Our analysis focuses on the Lower Valley of the Chubut River, in Patagonia (Argentina), where competition for water, changing climate, and increasing human impacts demand innovations in water management; a situation that is becoming common around the world. We analyze collaboration patterns among stakeholders, along with their ability to influence water-related ecosystem-service management actions and identify collaboration gaps that, if addressed, could dramatically improve coordinated implementation. Overall, all the identified management actions present lower levels of collaboration. In particular, we uncover high collaboration deficits regarding afforestation and wastewater treatment. In contrast, actions related to the construction of flood alleviation infrastructure stand out as an opportunity for coordinated implementation. Our study emphasizes the study of governance dynamics not only for providing contextual information for conservation policies, but as a tool to identify and prioritize actions.