2.1.2 Work in partnership

An efficient partnership should involve partners involved in decision making processes, experts in the various aspects of Ecosystem Services Assessments and stakeholders.

• Decision makers are defined as those with responsibility for initiating actions and so, depending on the context, may include national officials developing policy, or local organisations implementing awareness campaigns.
• Stakeholders are defined as those with an interest in the issue: decision makers can be a subset of the stakeholder group.
• Experts are defined as people able to identify the best methods to be used in a specific management context and implement it. For ecosystem service assessment, a panel of experts having at least a background in ecology and economics seems to be the most relevant.

A strong working relationship should be built between experts and decision makers through frequent communication.

All the responsibility for applying valuation data does not lie with the decision maker; deciding whether an assessment and possible valuation  is what is needed to answer the management question (and how results can and should be used) should be a joint process between the decision maker and those undertaking the assessment and the valuation and may include a written agreement to detail the requirements and expectations of both parties.