Prioritizing Stakeholders, Beneficiaries, and Environmental Attributes: A Tool for Ecosystem-Based Management

Abstract

Successful Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) approaches have advanced both a socio-ecological approach to systems thinking and the application of principles of structured decision making. This chapter presents a scoping tool designed to help decision makers in the early stages of their efforts by providing a transparent, repeatable, defendable approach for identifying and prioritizing stakeholders, the ways in which they use the environment (their beneficiary roles), and the most relevant environmental attributes for those uses as part of a set of decision criteria within a larger decision context. This scoping tool is a multi-criteria decision analysis approach that uses formalized criteria in stakeholder prioritization, along with the theoretical framework of the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) Classification System, to translate those prioritized stakeholders into the language of ecosystem services. The FEGS Scoping Tool is predicated on the idea that the decisions being made in a community can be complex, and that relevant and meaningful environmental decision criteria, let alone ecosystem services decision criteria, can be hard to identify and incorporate into the decision-making process.