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This book is about conflicts between different stakeholder groups triggered by protected species that compete with humans for natural resources. It presents key ecological features of typical conflict species and mitigation strategies including technical mitigation and the design of participatory decision strategies involving relevant stakeholders. The book provides a European perspective, but also develops a global framework for the development of action plans.

Diese Dissertation untersucht die Anreizwirkungen ökologischer Finanzausgleichsysteme auf die Ausweisung von Schutzgebieten. Mittels eines mikroökonomischen Modells werden die Potenziale eines ökologischen Finanzausgleiches für solch eine fiskalische Anreizsetzung im Naturschutz aufgezeigt und daraus überprüfbare Hypothesen generiert. Entsprechende empirische Nachweise einer Anreizwirkung in den existierenden ökologischen Finanzausgleichsystemen in Brasilen und Portugal werden durch Pandeldatenregressionen und Zeitreihenanalysen erbracht. Darüber hinaus werden drei konkrete Vorschläge für mögliche Anpassungen des Instrumentes auf föderaler, supranationaler und globaler Ebene durch quantitative Simulationen und unter Betrachtung der spezifischen institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen entwickelt. Damit erbringt die Dissertation eine evidenzbasierte Grundlage für Politikempfehlungen hinsichtlich der Gestaltung ökologischer Finanzausgleichsysteme.

Portugal has a unitary system in which the central government transfers funds to lower government levels for their public functions. In 2007, Portugal introduced Ecological Fiscal Transfers (EFT), where municipalities receive transfers for hosting Protected Areas (PA). We study whether introducing EFT in Portugal incentivized municipalities to designate PA and has led to a decentralization of conservation decisions. We employ a Bayesian structural time series approach to estimate the effect of introducing EFT in comparison to a simulated counterfactual time series. Quantitative results show a significant increase in the ratio of municipal and national PA designations following Portugal's EFT introduction. The analysis furthermore places emphasis on the importance of relevant municipal conservation competencies and the role of local decision makers' motivations for PA designations. Results have important implications for conservation policy-making in terms of allocating budgets and competencies in multi-level governments.

Ecological Fiscal Transfers (EFT) have recently gained attention as a promising instrument to provide incentives for nature conservation addressing public authorities. In parallel, both the EU and different European countries are exploring new mechanisms to mobilise funding to support biodiversity conservation. So far, existing EFT mechanisms in Europe have been implemented at the national level in Portugal and, to some extent, in France while in Brazil EFT schemes exist between the state and local level. In this paper we develop a proposal for an EFT design within the supranational context of the EU and assess its potential effects with evidence-based estimates. To provide such a knowledge base for a potential supranational EU-EFT implementation, we i) provide a theoretical underpinning, and an analytical synthesis of the current experiences both with the uptake of EFT and the implementation of EU's nature conservation legislation (i.e. the Habitats and Bird Directives), ii) propose a model for an EFT implementation within the existing EU funding framework for N2k financing which is built upon both quantitative and qualitative conservation indicators, iii) compute fiscal effects of our suggested model and analyse how the resulting payments would be (spatially) distributed among European regions, and iv) discuss the model outcomes in terms of ecological effectiveness, distributive effects, and cost-efficiency. Thereby we aim at stimulating a debate about how to better integrate ecological public functions within multi-level and supra-national governance structures.

Ecological Economics inherently faces a challenge akin to sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. In Greek mythology these are two monsters located on opposite sides of a narrow strait, and falling victim to one or other of them is unavoidable. In the recurring process of establishing and refining its conceptual foundations, Ecological Economics runs the risk of, on the one hand, losing important insights by trying to be radically different from mainstream economics and, on the other hand, becoming a redundant appendix to mainstream environmental economics by routinely applying its concepts and methods. We argue that avoiding both fallacies is possible by using Ecological Economics' orientation towards sustainability as a guiding principle. The scientist's power of judgment supports her decision concerning which methods are suitable for tackling a given sustainability problem. The intersubjective quality of judgment prevents the resulting methodological pluralism from drifting toward arbitrariness.

One of the core challenges of biodiversity conservation is to better understand the interconnectedness and interactions of scales in ecological and governance processes. These interrelationships constitute not only a complex analytical challenge but they also open up a channel for deliberative discussions and knowledge exchange between and among various societal actors which may themselves be operating at various scales, such as policy makers, land use planners, members of NGOs, and researchers. In this paper, we discuss and integrate the perspectives of various disciplines academics and stakeholders who participated in a workshop on scales of European biodiversity governance organised in Brussels in the autumn of 2010. The 23 participants represented various governmental agencies and NGOs from the European, national, and sub-national levels. The data from the focus group discussions of the workshop were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The core scale-related challenges of biodiversity policy identified by the participants were cross-level and cross-sector limitations as well as ecological, social and social-ecological complexities that potentially lead to a variety of scale-related mismatches. As ways to address these cha­llenges the participants highlighted innovations, and an aim to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to support the processes aiming to solve current scale challenges.