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Developing Institutions to Overcome Governance Barriers to Ecoregional Conservation

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Landscape-scale Conservation Planning

Abstract

Threats to biodiversity occur at local, regional, and landscape level scales. As a result responses to these threats increasingly use a systematic process to identify important habitat at large enough scales necessary to support biodiversity that is currently or potentially threatened by human activity. However despite the relative agreement regarding emerging best practices for identifying and ranking areas within an eco-region for conservation and the wide use of eco-regional planning and ecosystem management in both developed and developing nations, biodiversity and the habitats they rely on continue to degrade. In most cases, one of the major barriers to implementing these landscape scale conservation plans appears to be poor institutional coordination and cooperation (horizontal and vertical fragmentation) across eco-regional scales. This paper describes some of the common barriers to effective eco-regional governance which hamper the implementation of conservation planning efforts and proposes specific steps and conditions necessary for the development of eco-regional institutions, which are thought to overcome governance fragmentation. As complex and transboundary threats such as climate change, pollution, and land conversion increase, it is thought that without this transformation in governance, biodiversity will continue to decline.

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  1. Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management, Clemson University, 128 McGinty Court, Clemson, SC, 29634-0735, USA

    Robert B. Powell

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Correspondence to Robert B. Powell .

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  1. , Department of Biology and Program in Env, Middlebury College, Middlebury, 05753, USA

    Stephen C. Trombulak

  2. , Department Forestry and Natural Resource, Clemson University, Lehotsky Hall 261, Clemson, SC, 29634-0317, USA

    Robert F. Baldwin

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Powell, R.B. (2010). Developing Institutions to Overcome Governance Barriers to Ecoregional Conservation. In: Trombulak, S., Baldwin, R. (eds) Landscape-scale Conservation Planning. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9575-6_4

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