Ecological Functions and Functionings: Towards a Senian Analysis of Ecosystem Services

Abstract

Ecosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyse environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services‐based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even for restricting, development outcomes. This article seeks to connect environmental analysis with development outcomes better by applying the capability approach of Amartya Sen and others. It demonstrates how scientific analysis of ecosystem services sometimes conflates pathways of ecosystem management with development outcomes, but that it can be reconfigured to include more diverse values and objectives. The article argues that ecosystem services should be identified more as ‘functionings’ (in the Senian sense of valued development outcomes) rather than ‘functions’ (in the sense of biophysical, apolitical ecosystem properties) in order to indicate that ‘services’ always reflect social values, and that values and scientific explanations of underlying biophysical properties evolve together. Environmental science for socially valued outcomes such as ecosystem services is therefore an important site of political inclusion and exclusion. The article illustrates this analysis with examples of ecosystem‐based adaptation to climate change from the World Bank and government of Bangladesh, and in contrast to differing approaches from the field of sustainability science.

Assessing the contribution of ecosystem services to human wellbeing: A disaggregated study in western Rwanda

“…One suggestion to improve this situation is to incorporate social data based on the capability approach, to enrich understanding of how people use and value ecosystem services (Polishchuk and Rauschmayer, 2012;Forsyth, 2015). This research has explored the utility of this approach by identifying and analysing a set of five categories of socio-ecological reductionism which commonly occur in ecosystem service research and ecosystem management (summarised in Table 1): a failure to consider different types of values; aggregation of people across large scales; oversight of power relations; a focus on single land use types (commonly biodiversity-rich habitats); and lack of attention to changes occurring in people's lives and their drivers.…”

“…The capabilities approach to understanding human wellbeing (Sen, 1984) has been recognised as a promising framework for exploring connections between ecosystem services and wellbeing (Costanza et al, 2007;Polishchuk and Rauschmayer, 2012;Forsyth, 2015). This paper draws on a capabilities approach to help address the five forms of reductionism described above.…”

The Roles of Formal and Informal Institutions in Small Tourism Business Development in Rural Areas of South China

“…In their study, endowments is defined as "the rights and resources that social actors have", entitlements as "legitimate effective command over alternative commodity bundles", and capabilities as "what people can do or be with their entitlements" [20] (p. 233). The environmental entitlements framework has been widely used by scholars in different fields [11,[31][32][33][34][35], particularly in the field of natural resource management [28,[36][37][38][39]. However, institutional analysis in tourism literature is very limited [40].…”

Revealing ecological processes or imposing social rationalities? The politics of bounding and measuring ecosystem services

“…Since ES analysts often aim to contribute to constructing or changing environmental institutions Daw et al, 2011), it is important to consider how formal institutions (such as environmental planning instruments) can act to privilege certain social rationalities and ways of knowing the environment, while excluding others (Brondezio et al, 2010). Vatn (2009) emphasizes that ES applications contain particular rationalities (such as self-interested utility maximization, or treating different environments as equivalent) that then become de facto parts of policy problem framings and which are subsequently reproduced through the design of governance instruments (e.g., see Forsyth, 2015). These are not just questions about biophysical processes and their interrelationships; they are also questions about inclusive democracy and which forms of social-ecological relationships ought to be recognized, protected and encouraged.…”

“…By articulating a category of value (or received 'service'), researchers are proposing that an entity has value and matters in some way (Forsyth, 2015). In this sense we as researchers should not assume that our categories of value or ES are objective or 'scientific', but rather we should reflect on where they have come from and how they influence the particular local context.…”