Ecosystem Context Analysis

The PROGES Ecosystem Context Analysis is a methodological tool providing straight-forward paths for multi-stakeholder analyses. It allows establishing and managing a participatory analytical process, which ensures an effective dialogue between stakeholders from the civil society, technical and/or scientific organisations, and administrative institutions toward reaching a common understanding of the relevant EB-ICZM context.

The Ecosystem Context Analysis is part of the PROGES Integrated Spatial Planning suite; it is usually applied in conjunction with the System Cause-Effect Analysis and the PROGES-ISP software tool.

Complex interaction between ecological and socio-economic dynamics made simple

The Ecosystem Context Analysis procedure is based on deterministic rather than statistical or algorithmic ecological assessments to identify and assess the relationships between ecosystem components, functions and services, along with associated human activities.

To this end, complex ecological and socio-economic dynamics are decomposed in a structured set of elemental items and interactions between them; a boxes-and-arrows diagram is thus built which models the natural and human systems which underlie the relevant management scenarios by identifying their structural components (boxes) and their interactions (arrows).

Each of these components (identifed throghut an element of the diagram) is in turn further characterized through a set of quantitative indexes and indicators.

Stakeholders establish an effective dialogue and develop a common management view

Stakeholders jointly develop their management model following a sequential three stages analytical process moving from a conceptual (system matrixes), through a qualitative-structural (system diagram), to a quantitative-structural (system diagram and indicators) practical representation of the biological, environmental and socio-economic systems spanning the focused spatial domain.