Conceptual discussions on the impacts of ecosystem services (ESS) on human well-being have largely been boiled down to limits and applications of their monetisation. Therefore, in practice, the use of the ESS concept has been to a large extent boiled down to payment-for-ecosystem-services...

This report constitutes the main deliverable of WorkPackage 2 of GoverNat, "Assessing multilevel activities in water and biodiversity governance", dealing with an assessment of state-ofthe- art European water and biodiversity governance, based on the analysis of a series of casestudies developed...

Participation is said to improve decisions on environmental conflicts. When investigating 16 case studies of participatory processes in European Water and Biodiversity Governance, which necessarily is multi-level, the picture becomes blurred: many different forms of participation can be...

International aid projects in post-communist countries were meant to support the existing systems of environmental protection during the transition period and also to introduce new standards of environmental governance. This paper looks at the role project evaluations can play in fulfilling...

Multicriteria analysis needs a normative basis. Utilitarianism could be such a normative basis, but it cannot meet the normative demands in the contexts of sustainable development. Another ethical approach, discursive ethics, can be applied to social dilemmas, but it cannot integrate all...

This article sketches a re-conceptualization of sustainable development (SD) on the basis of Sen's capability approach (CA). The notion of sustainable development was developed as a compromise in a political process and has been reinterpreted (some say diluted) again and again over the last 20...