Forest ecosystem services, corporate sustainability and local livelihoods in industrial plantations of China: Building conceptual awareness on the interlinkages

The concept of ecosystem services is emerging within the global environmental and development discourses as a leading contemporary narrative, together with related strategies, agendas, tools and practices. In addition to its role in public policy, this concept has implications for the private sector as well. Little knowledge exists, however, on the linkages between the private sector and ecosystem services, especially from the viewpoint of company stakeholder groups and/or ecosystem services beneficiaries. In this paper, we compared managers', experts' and village leaders' perceptions of plantation forestry in case of China. We observed a fairly high level of similarity between the opinions of managers and village leaders in comparison to those of managers and experts (i.e., policy advisors, local authorities, industry associations and consultants and non-governmental organizations). This could mean that managers and village leaders who, sharing local contextual knowledge, have more common ground than, for instance, managers and experts who share similar technical expertise. The overall observed differences in stakeholder perceptions open up possibilities to discuss the potential and limits of the ecosystem services narrative in legitimizing corporate sustainability strategy, and in deepening corporate sustainability agendas and practices in the context of an emerging economy such as China.