Identifying governance challenges in ecosystem services management - Conceptual considerations and comparison of global forest cases

Our results confirm that ecosystem management, which more strongly supports the provision of public goods and common pool resources, is often under strong pressure to be transformed into systems that mainly provide private goods. This can be partly explained by incentive constellations in the action situations of public goods and common pool resources. Therefore, governance has to be adapted to specific ESSs. ESS governance needs to identify institutions which best fit to different ESSs and to harmonize them for all the ESSs provided by the system. Our approach helps to understand why institutions fail or succeed in maintaining ESSs.