The limited understanding of how ecosystem service knowledge (ESK) is used in decision making constrains our ability to learn from, replicate, and convey success stories. We explore use of ESK in decision making in three international cases: national coastal planning in Belize; regional marine spatial planning on Vancouver Island, Canada; and regional land-use planning on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Decision makers, scientists, and stakeholders collaborated in each case to use a standardized ecosystem service accounting tool to inform spatial planning. We evaluate interview, survey, and observation data to assess evidence of 'conceptual', 'strategic', and 'instrumental' use of ESK. We find evidence of all modes: conceptual use dominates early planning, while strategic and instrumental uses occur iteratively in middle and late stages. Conceptual and strategic uses of ESK build understanding and compromise that facilitate instrumental use. We highlight attributes of ESK, characteristics of the process, and general conditions that appear to affect how knowledge is used. Meaningful participation, scenario development, and integration of local and traditional knowledge emerge as important for particular uses.

Designing, building and optimising projects as production systems producing value can be said to be the aim of construction management from an engineering perspective. However, the question is whose value are we optimising the system for? The lean philosophy tells we should deliver value to all the projects customers. However, here anyone that is impacted by the project is considered a customer, not just the paying client. Do all customers matter and is delivering value for all of them of equal importance?In this paper, we explore this matter by first looking into the literature on stakeholder management. Finding no suitable answers there we attack the question by considering the motivations for delivering value by a literature review and interviews with industry professionals. Finally, we discuss the implications that considering the perspective of multiple stakeholders brings to project management.The paper argues that the key to deciding whose value matter lies in understanding the motivation for why valueis delivered. However, to what degrees different factors motivates someone will be highly dependent on their philosophical outlook, thus making the matter of value for whom a philosophical question.

The importance of a collaborative environment to achieve success in projects has been widely discussed in the literature and different mechanisms have been developed and introduced to support a collaborative approach to construction projects, i.e. new forms of agreement, new office arrangements, financial incentives, a shared risk and reward approach, the development of shared goals, etc. However, the literature related to these mechanisms is predominantly prescriptive, with little evidence and justification on why some of these mechanisms might be important to support collaboration. In this paper, we focus on discussing the development of shared goals as a means to support collaboration. We collected findings from two case studies in which an explicit process for goal setting and tracking was used to emphasize a collaborative environment. The technique used in these projects are not new and have been documented elsewhere. However, the benefits of these kind of techniques to support collaboration have not been fully explored in the lean construction community. Thus, the intent of this paper is to report some of the benefits that a goal setting exercise brought to two construction projects while having a theoretical discussion to explain why such process can be beneficial and should also be considered -along with other mechanisms -as an important element to support collaboration.

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