Compromise or Conflict? Comparing Participatory and Economic Approaches to Evaluating Forest Ecosystem Services in the Fiumi Uniti River Basin

Forest ecosystem services provide essential tangible and intangible benefits to human societies. However, many of these services fall outside conventional market systems, making their valuation complex and often incomplete. This is particularly strong when multiple ecosystem services must be prioritized across large landscape units, where interactions and trade-offs further complicate their assessment. In this context, alternative participatory approaches may help overcome some of the limitations of traditional economic methods. The aim of this thesis is to assess whether traditional valuation methods produce evaluations of forest ecosystem service trade-offs that are consistent with those derived from participatory-based approaches. The analysis focuses on the Fiumi Uniti River Basin (Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy) and compares the outcomes of the two valuation exercises across four forest ecosystem services: flood mitigation, erosion control, wood provision, and carbon sequestration. Values were estimated under alternative forest management regimes (no management, business-as-usual, and conversion to high forest) to identify spatially explicit management strategies that maximize benefits while minimizing trade-offs among services. Results show that the outcomes of economic and participatory evaluations do not fully align, both in terms of prioritized management strategies and their spatial distribution. Economic valuation tends to favor management options that maximize monetizable and market-proxied benefits driven by wood production. In contrast, participatory-based evaluations place greater emphasis on regulating services favoring conservation-oriented strategies. Rather than indicating the superiority of one method over the other, these findings highlight their complementarity. When combined, economic and participatory approaches provide a more comprehensive and socially-legitimate basis for evaluating the multifunctional role of forest areas.