We have had the challenge of being an interdisciplinary team with diverse substantive interests. So the role of environmental values has been a touchstone across each of our efforts – and conceptualized as presented in the poster. The governance starting point for each of us is a natural resource management worlds that is an increasingly power-shared world (as opposed to the classic government model), but with legacies of inequality or at least unequal control. Empirically this presents itself as decision making or planning processes without a strong single actor – either because of legal mandates to share (consultation), competing regulatory requirements in restoration or forestry, or local constituencies effecting change at higher levels.

TEK is part of the tribal work, and local ecological knowledge simply local preferences are also involved in other settings that are not focused on tribes alone. The governance question for us collectively is whether decisions that use ecosystem services as a starting point to elicit local values, TEK and concerns serve to better represent and capture the needs and values of groups in pluralist settings.


Measuring success is a challenge. In some cases it is a qualitative measure of acceptance of decisions – capturing the legitimacy reported around decision outcomes. In other cases it is the ability to achieve ‘satisficing’ levels for multiple parties.


Each of our areas of research are contested in terms of both the values and the science – so it becomes a question of how the involved parties, agencies, and interests move to closure on a policy question, and how well this is perceived by those involved.

Our work is moving the role of ecosystem services to the front of decision making processes and management. This differentiates from a model where economic models are offered to resolve conflict – we see ecosystem services as illuminating and communicating values and issues.

Results out of these efforts are evaluated in the context of a contested knowledge and power setting – where claims to what is ‘right’ is open to interpretation. Therefore successful efforts can be evaluated by perceptions by participants of the legitimacy of the decision and their willingness to continue working together. Success of projects is also defined differently by each group – for example in restoration projects the outcomes that signify success vary across federal fishery managers, local watershed groups, and tribes.

In the case of the ocean research example, some decision settings have used many models at once making planning outcomes difficult to interpret. The role of various models and public involvement processes have become obscured by the models and therefore trust in the process is not high across all groups. This suggests that some problems can be over parameterized, or that conflict can be obscured in the models, resulting in an agreement that is not as durable. This durability can be evaluated with research on perceptions, or observing active protests or challenges to the process.

We have many pieces going on! I am PhD student in the Public Affairs and Policy program. My research focus is on the role of science and technology in marine management. In particular how science and technology further or develop interests on the ocean, and how these tools shape policy for the ocean. My research has looked at how new participatory geographical information systems (pGIS) change how interest groups gain or lose access to decisions, and how these systems create new mapping politics.

Also involved in the work on this poster are students from cultural anthropology, wetland ecology, landscape ecology, marine ecology and urban studies.

Thank you.

Thats a great question – and one we are not tackling head on! I think its critical to capture. It would be interesting to see if ecosystem services play a role in whether democratic systems are instrumental or deliberative? Or if there is a “convergence” in agreement in contested systems such as argued by Bryan Norton on using measures of outcomes for sustainability. Thank you.

Gary, thank you for your question. To add more fuel to the fire, some of my section of the project approaches the question you pose. My specific focus in looking at green infrastructure is to see how chaning values regarding the role of nature in the city actually end up changing the metrics we use to measure services – this fleshes out the changing perceptions of services. I see it as a first step in addressing the question you bring up. It does not address the entire feedback mechanism, but hopefully will bring us closer to observing shifts in values and perceptions of services.

Thanks Hannah-

We have definitely moved towards a more pluralistic model for ecosystem services, and away from a purely economic model. In part the work with tribes helps this – it is one of the few opportunities in US politics where multiple world views are accepted as the starting point! But it is just as applicable to many other communities.

I think our work represents a shift of ecosystem services as a concept from the end of a problem to the beginning. In other words we have been working with the concepts in ecosystem services as a tool to bring in new concerns, values, and visions at the beginning of a social problem or question – as opposed to looking to ecosystem services to provide a final answer. Of course this perpective reflects a particular environment all of us are working in – one where values are more plural across legitimate groups. A benefit of working with tribal governments is that they provide an accepted second viewpoint to mainstream or dominant views in a political challenge.

That said – we do see ecosystem services as a way to communicate values. The structure and concept model of ecosystem services provided by Potschin and Haines-Young (2011) is one we share as a starting point. That model allows for higher level values to be decomposed or broken out to elements in biophysical features – but still recognizing the social work required to make those connections.

This model argues that trying to distill environmental values to a number is problematic, but that using ecosystem services to tease out what and where we worry about natural systems is a good way to start problem solving.

Potschin, Marion B., and Roy H. Haines-Young. 2011. “Ecosystem Services: Exploring a Geographical Perspective.” Progress in Physical Geography 35(5): 575–94.

Thanks for such thorough response! Good luck!

Yes! TEK is critical for the three Trainees here working on natural resource issues in the Columbia River Basin. Namely around wetland restoration, forest management and lamprey research. Outside of the formally tribal setting, local ecological knowledge is also part of the work, such as with fishers on the Oregon coast or forest community members. It helps also identify new resources in addition to adding insights on quantification.