A combined approach based on ecosystem services and environmental justice: the case study of Circeo National Park, Italy

Starting from its born, the Ecosystem Services (ES) approaches become important for linking human and nature, and for supporting different decision-making and management contexts, in particular conservation strategies, landscape and urban planning, and compensative policies. However, the ES literature has been criticized for adopting a homogenous approach to communities and failing to consider social diversity, power structures influencing access to benefits, and participation in the management of ES. Still, despite the growing body of literature on ES, considerations of Environmental Justice (EJ) tend to fall short in ES assessments and therefore in planning and policy. EJ scholarship has traditionally parsed out a framework of justice based on a trilogy of concerns: the distributional justice, that can provide a framework to focus on the spatial and temporal distribution of costs, benefits, and risks of ES; the recognitional justice, referring the recognition of people’s varying values associated with ES; and the procedural justice, that considers the participation in the procedures through which decisions are made about ES. The main goal of the present thesis is to explore in which extent an ES approach with an EJ lens can support the environmental governance. The research was developed in three main parts: a literature review, a systematic review, and an empirical application in Circeo National Park (Italy). Although the two fields seem to focus on two distinct aspects of the environment – the original idea of EJ revolved around the negative health impacts of environmental degradation and pollution, while ES highlights benefits of ecosystems beyond health –, the two literature reviews showed different meetings points. First, the literature review integrated the aspects of EJ in ES, exploring their interconnections, and considering EJ as an analytical approach to thinking about ES issues. Second, the systematic literature review investigated how the different approaches of ES and justice were used for real-world application, how they evolved over time, and which trends have followed in order to identify possible gaps. The systematic review explored the number and type (conceptual, review, or empirical) of publications, the geographical distribution and scale of case studies analysed, the ES and justice dimensions investigated, and the governance contexts explored. Lastly, the analysis of the case study was useful to apply the ES and EJ combined approach with the purpose of understanding how and why the ES conservation policies in Circeo National Park generated different benefits and costs among different groups within society and were related to diverse kind of injustices. The addition of an EJ lens in combination with the ES approach revealed local perceptions critical to ES trade-offs and identified different stakeholders’ objectives. The thesis highlighted that EJ can uncover existing and potential social conflicts between management and use, especially when conservation policies are applied without due consideration of the interests and needs of local communities. Moreover, EJ provides a well-developed lens to focus on fair treatment of all with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.