Ecosystem Services: never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis

The idea of ecosystem services has been presented as a unifying, harmonising concept; a 'statement of the art' crafted around an orderly structure of theories, methods, and applications to make sense of its work. The mutually configuring worlds of research and policy that seek to explicate and apply the concept of ecosystem services are also mutable, unruly and highly fluid; readers who have scratched beneath the surface will have found a highly differentiated and contested field. The ecosystem services agenda is functioning as a gathering and passing through-point, and this has its own momentum effects, not least in exposing to scrutiny basic claims, arguments and ambitions. The sentiments of M. E. Soule capture something of the transdisciplinary dynamic at the heart of innovation in the field of ecosystem services – another crisis discipline – where practical questions and problems of resource management have often run ahead of a settled evidence base.