Towards a land management approach to ecological restoration to encourage stakeholder participation

In the field of ecological restoration, many authors call for more stakeholder participation in the process of restoration. In their opinion, when a restoration project is planned, the range of points of view and the knowledge of local stakeholders need to be taken into account to limit the risk of failure. Although effective stakeholder involvement is often cited as a factor of success, in practice, it is far from systematic. To understand the ways in which the stakeholders actually participate in projects and their opinion of the projects, we analysed three restoration projects. We interviewed the people who would be affected by the projects in the French Pyrenean Mountains: inhabitants, livestock farmers, and other users of the territory, site managers, locally elected officials, experts, and development agents. Our results revealed that how interviewees viewed the outcome and the success of a restoration project depended on their own activity, which also influenced the way they viewed and defined the territory concerned by restoration. Two different perceptions of ecological restoration objectives and approaches coexist in the Pyrenees. The first is highly technical and the aim is simply to restore the original plant cover. In this case, the 'territory' is limited to the area to be restored and its immediate surroundings. The second perception of restoration takes into account both past and other possible land uses and consequently concerns a larger territory and the users of the site to be restored. If the participation of local actors in the restoration process is desired, we recommend a comprehensive land management approach to ecological restoration, as this approach is more likely to arouse the interest of the stakeholders.