Integrating ecosystem services and environmental planning: limitations and synergies

Environmental planning offers an important approach to dealing with the concept of ecosystem services (ESS) in practice. Nonetheless, spatial planning science has failed to connect with the international ESS discussion. Thus, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to make relevant environmental planning experience available to ESS researchers; second, to offer conceptual and methodological suggestions for future ESS assessments that consider key insights from European planning science. A systematic literature analysis was used to juxtapose several theoretical and methodological aspects of ESS assessment and environmental planning concepts in order to identify comparative benefits and potentials for an integration of the two approaches. To illustrate the limitations and potentials of the approaches, the example of German landscape planning is described. A better integration of the two approaches has the potential to (i) strengthen the spatial concreteness and scale relation of ESS on low tiers; (ii) foster accounting and monetary valuation in environmental planning, especially for applications on supra-regional scale; (iii) reflect on underlying values in the ESS approach and overcome a latent nature determinism; (iv) more clearly differentiate between public and private goods for better targeting implementation strategies; (v) help in developing context-dependent classification categories that can accommodate all implementation relevant services and relate services to beneficiaries; and (vi) frame communication and participation processes by reflecting their constitutional role in the political decision-making process.