Authors: Zuklin, Tomas;

This presentation not only introduces principles of conservation and participation as understood in the IUCN’s ecosystem governance theory, but also offers the first glance on the results of the currently finished research on prioritization of conservation in integrated environmental solutions and related decision-making processes.
Although the ecosystem governance theory has been gradually developed within IUCN since 2015, it has gained more significant traction in the past three years. In the 2020 research, participation and conservation were identified as two of the six ecosystem governance principles. Although listed separately, their inherent interconnectivity and inseparability makes them one of the cornerstones of the ecosystem governance theory. Since ecosystem governance is about the processes which eventually (should) lead to an on-site management practice, we asked, among other questions, stakeholders in coastal areas how they wish to be represented in environmental decision-making (contrasting with how they are represented now), and examined tendencies within regional and local decision-making with respect to conservation priorities. Results are presented here.