With Integrated Water Resources Management, a new water management paradigm arose. Since the 1990s, most countries worldwide have started to establish enabling environments and defined new institutional roles in order to manage their water resources in a cross-sectoral, multi-stakeholder and integrated way. This development has often occurred at the national level, but remained without subsequent implementation at the regional or local level in the form of water resources management at the river basin level. Problems of implementation at the river basin level are related to the identification of suitable management scales and real cross-sectoral stakeholder involvement. Conventional attempts have tried to solve these problems independently without paying attention to specific motivations of involved actors. The use of management instruments more flexible to specific implementation contexts has only a recent record. This contribution uses the concept of spatial fit and institutional interplay as an analytical framework to identify the problems of cross-sectoral integration and cooperation to find the right scale for both in a context-specific manner.
The application of the concept of hydrological ecosystem services reveals very context- and site-specific socio-ecologic relationships between service providers and beneficiaries from these services. These provision-supply relationships can be described spatially, thereby representing a possible solution to find an appropriate context- and site-specific scale for an integrated management of water and related resources.
This contribution reveals insights from empirical studies of the application of compensation schemes for hydrological ecosystem services that served to pave the way towards more integrated forms of water management. Prevailing problems of local water management could be identified and spatially related to ecosystem-based solutions. This way different stakeholder achieved more coordinated and cross-sectoral management.
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Climate change, demographic development and lifestyles put pressure on agricultural soils to increase food and energy production. At the same time the functions and related ecosystem services of these soils, such as water storage and filtering as well as carbon storage have to be ensured. Often the various different claims and demands on agricultural soils, such as food provision, water regulation and biodiversity protection, result in trade-offs but also synergies between the soil services requested by society. Understanding soil ecosystem services is a precondition to determine policies, which are able to steer sustainable soil management.
Most provisioning services of soils, such as food production, are tangible and recognized by decision makers – their value to society is often measurable. Regulating services of agricultural soils, although being fundamental for the delivery of provisioning services, are not yet as fully recognized, especially not in the context of their interdependences with provisioning services.
This contribution has twofold objectives: First, we revisit potential trade-offs and synergies between different a) provisioning services, b) regulating services and c) regulating and provisioning services in order to disentangle where trade-offs and synergies exist. Second, policies set incentives for management practices such as agri-environmental and climate measures for conversation tillage or subsidies on energy crops. Therefore, we analyse the trade-offs and synergies as they are triggered by the management practices that are aligned with the policies. In this regard, governance structures are analysed because the design and implementation of soil-related policies rest with different authorities. Therefore, the final step of the paper is to outline recommendations for amending policies and governance structures, such as improving the horizontal interplay of authorities, in order to steer more sustainable soil management.
The study has a regional focus on Germany. It is based on a survey and assessment of the effectiveness of different policies on regulation as well as on results of an interview survey on recommendations on how to increase the effectiveness of policies and governance structures. As a result a list of trade-offs, such as between biomass production for energy and soil fertility, is provided. The paper shows that strengthening regulating services does not automatically result in a quantitative reduction of provisioning services, such as cereal production. An acknowledgement of these synergies in policies that either dictate or encourage certain farming practices is required. We conclude that there is a need towards addressing and accounting for regulating services by policies especially at the regional scale.
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The paper explores the potentials of Ecosystem Service (ESS) to operationalize the bourgeoning Water‐Energy‐Food (WEF) nexus concept to address global climate and resource crises. WEF nexus is currently gaining unprecedented policy attention; however, operationalizing the nexus at policy and practice level is still a significant challenge. The paper argues that ESS approaches to climate change adaptation can effectively be used for unlocking the potentials of WEF nexus. Ecosystem generates the most crucial bundle of services for human wellbeing in form of water, energy and food. ESS approach to WEF nexus thus can ensure that we do not need to reinvent the wheel for operationalizing the concept, rather offers a pathway of integrating two interesting conceptual tools for sustainable future where the former focuses on adaptation and latter emphasizes resource management. Within the backdrop of climate change impacts, this is even more crucial in developing country context where adaptation finance is not so abundant and guaranteed. As a case study, an analysis is made to assess the roles of ESS in climate change adaptation policy‐making in Bangladesh; a climate vulnerable developing country. Methods involve reviews of major national development and climate change policies, livelihood, disaster risk reduction
(DRR), agriculture and urban sectoral policies as well as government funded adaptation projects. The reviewed polices and projects were divided over the different spectrums of policy‐making process such as (i) agenda setting e.g. national policies, (ii) policy formulation e.g. sectorial polices and (iii) policy implementation e.g. adaptation projects. The four national development and climate change policies that belong to the agenda setting stage demonstrated various degrees of progression to materialize ESS potentials into actions. Results also showed that potential ESS scopes were often disproportionately undermined and completely ignored in national policies e.g. livelihood and urban sectors. Nonetheless, ESS’s presence in national policies could be the foundation for subsequent sectorial policies for greater ESS consideration for sectorial resilience and development as well as integrating WEF principles. In contrast, the sectorial policies of policy formulation stage demonstrated even weaker picture in terms of ESS consideration in their future development vision. All four sectors e.g. agriculture, DRR, livelihood and urban are the most potential hosts for applying ESS approach. However, only 33 proposed actions are found among the total 542 actions that can be divided among livelihood, agriculture and urban sectors. These statistics are clearly a step backward considering the political willingness evident at the national agenda setting stage. The paper also reviews the nature of 329 adaptation projects funded by the government of Bangladesh and implemented by its different ministries. The result showed that over the last six years, only 38 projects can be categorized having ESS potentials which cost only 15.70% of total budget. The projects are mainly in form of river dredging, agricultural research, forestry, biodiversity and environmental management which address DRR, livelihood and agricultural adaptation. The review, therefore, demonstrated that ESS consideration in policy making arena of Bangladesh gradually loss its momentum at sectorial (policy formulation) and project (implementation) level. The review also argued that (i) dominant structural adaptation ideologies (ii) expert and bureaucracy dependent policy making process and (iii) lack of adaptive and integration capacities at institutional level could offset the increasing consideration of ESS at policy and project level, so do WEF thinking. The paper, therefore, suggests number of pathways including effective mainstreaming of climate change adaptation issues at sectorial level, improving stakeholder participation and increasing institutional adaptive capacity to deal with climate change for improved ESS consideration as well seamless integration of WEF nexus.
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Key words: financial incentive instruments, governance models, water quality, water availability
There seems to be a strong link between the mainstreaming of the ecosystem service concept and the attention for and implementation of payments for ecosystem services (PES). Thereby, most people primarily associate monetary valuation of nature with the ecosystem service concept putting PES as economic instruments in the prior focus.
Furthermore, beside the fact that there is no valid argument in general which favours PES over legal instruments, PES in practise are often far away from the theoretic concept behind classical economic instruments.
Based on eight case studies in Germany, the US and Great Britain I will introduce the broad variety of institutional settings and stakeholder constellations of successful payments for water ecosystem services. Specific focus is given to the interaction of different types of governance models within these PES differentiating between hierarchical, market based and cooperation-/community-based models. The role of state and civil society actors for PES as a ‘market-based’ governance model will be discussed. The analysis of the PES case studies is based on qualitative interviews and desk research.
The results give evidence that pure market based solutions are only one suitable approach under consideration of lower complexity; otherwise the requirements for institutionalizing a market, such as the identification of providers and beneficiaries and the delimitation of the ES, are too expensive or do not fit into the specific institutional context.

Regional planning and vision development of rural areas often suffers from sectorial bias, short-term and localized problem solving, and neglect of stakeholder aspirations. This often leads to solutions which are sub-optimum, and which insufficiently address sustainability issues and land-users expectations. Together with planners and responsible sectorial agencies in case studies in Belgium and Syria, an ecosystem services (ESS) framework in combination with participatory planning approaches was used as an alternative way to address the above challenges.
An ESS approach was adopted as a guiding framework to develop a vision for several reasons: it was felt that ESS stimulate positive thinking, it was expected to stimulate multi-sectoral thinking, and it was considered as a suitable vehicle to achieve resilient and multi-functional landscapes. The main tool to build a widely-supported vision was a series of interactive workshops. The workshops stimulated social learning among partners, increased understanding for other positions, enabled networking, and contributed to higher trust between stakeholders. By asking participants to list desired benefits for the future (e.g. 2030), participants were enabled to think more freely (out-of-the-box), and as such we avoided to be bogged down in today problems and conflicts. Scoring and prioritization were found to be simple, yet helpful tools to structure the different ideas. Another powerful tool was the question to identify potential win-win situation between desired services, as this enabled to build bridges between (usually contradicting) sectors. Water-related services often provided a suitable red-thread to connect different stakeholder needs and concerns.
Strength of employing the ESS concept as a vehicle for vision development was that it was easy to understand, that it was very inclusive, and that it stimulated participants to reflect about the structures and processes which they depend on. Overall, the concept and the used approach can certainly contribute to vision development, especially for rural regions with complex land-use and many involved stakeholders. However, four elements require special attention: the engagement with non-participating stakeholders (e.g. less influential and affected groups, powerful and unconcerned partners), inclusion of invisible ESS and aspects which are not ecosystem-related, and efficient use of workshop time.
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