Governance of Ecosystem Services Across Scales in Bangladesh

Ecosystem services (MEA 2005) are governed and affected by a diverse variety of different legal and governance frameworks (Paavola et al. 2009), although analysis of these legal frameworks has rarely been carried out (Salzman et al. 2001). Ideally, these frameworks are integrated and coordinated with a view to achieving common objectives, but in reality they are often developed and implemented within sectoral boundaries without reference to each other. For example, the provisioning ecosystem service of freshwater is potentially affected by management and policy decisions related to water abstraction, pollution control and agricultural land use and flood risk alleviation, among others. Laws and institutions often fail to address cross-cutting issues that are shared across sectors and approaches to these issues are therefore frequently fragmented and incomplete