With growing human pressures on the oceans and seas, the resulting decline of
ecosystem health and biodiversity is increasingly limiting the ability of marine
ecosystems to provide essential functions and resources for human wellbeing. To
prevent further marine degradation, an ecosystem based approach to marine
management is needed. An integral part of this is constructive stakeholder
engagement. However, in a marine context, engagement is often difficult due to
traditionally sectoral management and the complexity of marine issues.
This thesis presents an interdisciplinary study that evaluates the potential of the
ecosystem services approach to support and improve marine stakeholder engagement.
First, opportunities and challenges of using the approach in participatory marine
management processes were explored through interviews with 39 stakeholders who
participated in the application of ecosystem service assessment to marine
management in six French and UK case studies. The interviews revealed that the
ecosystem services approach can facilitate participatory engagement by improving
understanding of complex ecological-socioeconomic systems and fostering
constructive dialogue. Second, the potential of the approach for communicating
marine management decisions to marine users was tested with a scenario based
survey. Responses to three versions of the survey, two with and one without
ecosystem services content, were compared, showing that the ecosystem services
information did not increase agreement with the management measures proposed in
the scenario.
An evaluation of the results in the context of environmental behaviour research
suggests that the novelty and complexity of the ecosystem services approach might
limit its usefulness for top down communication. In contrast, if the approach is
integrated in participatory processes, it was concluded that this could have multiple
benefits for ecosystem based marine management. From these findings, a conceptual
model was developed that provides a normative framework for the effective use of the
ecosystem services approach to support constructive participatory engagement in
marine governance