International policy efforts championing ecosystem restoration are underway in response to human‐induced ecosystem degradation. At the national scale, Norway is attempting to integrate restoration as a key policy target into its environmental governance and policy frameworks. Historical restoration efforts have tended to be small‐scale and fragmented and have encountered considerable challenges. To better understand what these challenges are and to facilitate the upscaling of restoration, this article assesses barriers as experienced by managers in 102 Norwegian restoration projects collected in a web‐based survey. We found that the respondents tended to describe barriers as individual and isolated issues, such as for example, treating financial or knowledge‐related obstacles separately. Taken together, the barriers identified here share similarities with other international cases in that, despite being context‐specific restoration experiences, similar barriers appear across different scales. This suggests that a more integrated perspective is needed to move beyond fragmented treatment of restoration barriers and toward showing how restoration barriers are symptoms of deeper underlying governance structures and systemic patterns.
Sutcliffe et al. (Tue,) studied this question.