Introduction

There is great need for modern societies to find more sustainable ways of securing good living environments and the resources upon which societies depend. In the academic community this has spurred an interest in what has been called transformative change, i.e. how “old” regimes of natural resource management deemed as non-sustainable can transform so as to establish “new” regimes of ecosystem-based management (Olsson et al., 2004 and references below). This is often described as a shift from top–down bureaucracies that narrowly focus on a single (and commercially viable) species (e.g. a fish or a crop), to a more integrated approach that acknowledges a wider array of stakeholders, and that monitors and builds knowledge of landscape-level ecological processes (such as water flows and pollination) that underpin ecological functions (Olsson et al., 2004). Ecosystem-based management has been argued to better cope with the interconnectedness, uncertainties, and dynamics of ecosystems in a human-dominated world (Holling, 1978; Christensen et al., 1996).