Over the centuries, specific farming practices shaped permanent grasslands in mountains. With socioeconomic change, farming practices have changed and with them the landscape. Over time, food production has been increasingly decoupled from the preservation of permanent grassland, endangering the delivery of crucial ecosystem services. This contribution looks into the role of institutions-including normative, regulative and cultural-cognitive elements-in preserving current bundles of ecosystem services provided by mountain grasslands. In particular, we investigate how such institutions affect farmers' management choices. Based on a review of scientific literature and empirical data from three case studies, we compare institutions in Austria, France and Norway. The cases represent different modes of multi-level governance (EU and non-EU), different grassland management practices, linked to different farming systems (dairy, breeding, rearing of heifers, suckler cow and sheep production) and different socioeconomic conditions. The results underpin that ecological insights into the impact of farming practices on the ecology of grassland need to be combined with an understanding of the complex institutional interactions that affect farming practices, to ensure the resilience of mountain grasslands. If the design of regulatory measures considers both changing dynamics, it may enable farms to adapt and transform while maintaining traditional grassland management practices.

Mountain social-ecological systems (SES) supply important ecosystem services that are threatened by climate change. In mountain SES there is a paradox between high community capacity to cope with extremes, and governance structures and processes that constrain that capacity from being realised.Climate adaptation maintaining livelihoods and supply of ecosystem services can catalyse this innate adaptive capacity if new adaptive governance arrangements can be created. Using the French Alps as a case study, we outline a participative framework for transformative adaptation that links adaptive capacity and governance to provide social innovation and ecosystem-based adaptation solutions for mountain SES. Grassland management was the main entry point for adaptation: bundles of adaptation services supplied by the landscape mosaic of biodiverse grassland types can maintain agricultural production and tourism and facilitate income diversification. Deliberate management for core adaptation services like resilient fodder production, erosion control, shade or aesthetic value generates co-benefits for future transformation ability. People activate bundles of adaptation services along adaptation pathways and realise benefits via co-production with other forms of capital including traditional knowledge or social networks. Common and distinctive adaptation services in each pathway create options for transformation if barriers from interactions between values and rules across scales can be overcome. For example conserving mown terraces which is a critical adaptation nexus reflects a complex interplay of values, markets and governance instruments from local to European scales. We conclude that increasing stakeholders capacity to mobilise adaptation services is critical for empowering them to implement adaptation to global change. the long-term, and long-term adaptation responses which may discount short-term needs (Maru et al., 2014). For example in mountains, current climate adaptation of winter tourism through snow making prevents long-term thinking and engagement to find alternative options, while compromising water resources and biodiversity. Conversely, foregoing this technological option and choosing to develop softer tourism may incur a risky economic transition. This trade-off is exacerbated in remote communities by dependence on uncertain natural resources, limited economic options due to biophysical constraints and distance from markets, difficulties in accessing public services and decision makers, and reliance on government subsidies. Throughout history, mountain ecosystems were buffered from biophysical change by their topographic complexity and glacial dynamics (Randin et al., 2009; Scherrer and Körner, 2010). Mountain people have adapted to live in extreme, variable environments (von Glasenapp and Thornton, 2011). But now, rapid climate change and resulting ecological shifts and increased natural risks, synergised with external policy and market pressures and detachment from governance structures and processes ha...