SPECIAL ISSUE THE VALUES OF WETLANDS: LANDSCAPE AND INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES Valuation of wetlands in a landscape and institutional perspective

What is a wise use of nature? This perennial issue, always controversial due to conflicting human interests, has in the last decade tended to be clothed in the context of ‘sustainable development’. The rapid breakthrough of this concept in political and scientific spheres has brought to our attention the dependence of human survival and well-being upon ecosystem supports (e.g. Baskin, 1997; Costanza et al., 1997; Daily, 1997), as well as the susceptibility of ecosystems to human influences. How can such a political and scientific attention to ecosystems be translated to good public policy? One necessary prerequisite is likely to be the adoption of a landscape perspective. Such a perspective implies studies of the biological and physical interactions among a mosaic of ecosystems in heterogeneous land areas that together comprise landscapes. It is worth emphasising, however, that human presence and man-made social, economic and physical structures are equally ‘natural’ landscape elements, continually interacting with ecosystems. The fact that humans and nature are inseparable, and the apparently ever-increasing human influence on her biological and physical environments, make an analysis of the linkages between ecosystems and humans an indispensable part of a landscape perspective. Institutional design in the context of interaction between society and nature has indeed been subject to several recent studies, for example, Ostrom (1990), Bromley (1991), Hanna et al. (1996), and Berkes and Folke (1998). Institutions include social norms, codes and other informal constraints for human behaviour as well as formal ones such as constitutions and laws. Their design is one key to understanding human preferences and behaviour in relation to nature. The study of institutions is thus an integral part of a landscape perspective. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +46-8-6739540; fax: +46-8152464. E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Söderqvist).