Chapter 5 – Inquiring into the Governance of Ecosystem Services: An Introduction

The present chapter develops a brief, introductory account of some of the more stringent perspectives and proposals on how to inquire into the governance of ecosystem services. The objective is not to provide a state-of-the-art document, but to propose a limited set of contingent domains of inquiry. The double shift from government to governance and from ecosystems/species as the object of steering to ecosystem services drastically opens the set of domains of inquiry into recognizing more complexity, more processes, more actors, more natures of actors, more dynamics, more networks, more scales, and more times. We conclude that while embracing knowledge diversity has been considered a strategy for taking into account the many faces of complexity, the foreclosure of knowledge-providing mechanisms is an obvious issue of power that should be subjected to closer inquiry in socioecological governance thinking.