Environmental justice research shows the importance of social feedbacks in ecosystem service trade-offs

Abstract

Pasgaard, and L. V. Rasmussen. 2017. Environmental justice research shows the importance of social feedbacks in ecosystem service trade-offs. ABSTRACT. In this article, we shine a spotlight on approaches to research ecosystem service trade-offs and critically assess their representation of relevant social dynamics. Although studies linking ecosystem services and human well-being have provided theoretical insights into social and ecological trade-offs, we argue that ecosystem services research has paid insufficient attention to "social feedbacks," people's cognitive and behavioral responses to change. We demonstrate that augmenting ecosystem services research with environmental justice approaches (exploring perceptions of the distribution of costs and benefits, decision making procedures, and recognition of different values and identities) can more effectively capture important responses to ecosystem governance. Spatial analysis of land use change, mixed-method assessment of multidimensional well-being, and qualitative environmental justice research were applied in three villages adjacent to Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area in northern Laos. Spatial analysis showed that, from 2006 to 2015, forest clearance for cultivation remained stable within the protected area. Well-being assessment revealed the local population benefited from rapidly increasing incomes, asset ownership, and reduced poverty during that time. In combination, spatial and well-being analyses paint a picture of limited trade-offs, despite growing incentives to exploit protected land and resources through cash crops and high-value forest products. In contrast, results from environmental justice research revealed profound trade-offs between conservation and local practices, and highlight governance deficiencies relating to procedure and recognition. Consequently, formal protected area rules were perceived to be illegitimate by many and actively undermined, for example through negotiated access with alternative authorities. We conclude that although well-being research provides an essential foundation to understand diverse attachments to natural resources, the addition of environmental justice research can reveal local perceptions and social feedbacks critical to ecosystem service trade-offs, and highlight pathways to reconcile them through satisfying stakeholders' diverse, dynamic objectives.

Incorporating basic needs to reconcile poverty and ecosystem services

“…Whether or not harm as a result of missing basic needs is caused or alleviated directly by conservation efforts, people being deprived of their basic needs impose instrumental and moral constraints and responsibilities on conservation organizations. Future work could pay more attention to how people feel about conservation governance, which has been shown by Dawson et al (2017) to vary independently of more objective measures of well-being. Thus, our approach could be complimented by an environmental-justice approach that more explicitly addresses people's experiences of different dimensions of environmental justice.…”

Harnessing Insights from Social-Ecological Systems Research for Monitoring Sustainable Development

“…The paucity of SDG indicators that capture social-ecological feedbacks (18%) is a cause for concern. Advances in capturing them are already available from multiple areas of study, including ecosystem services [135][136][137][138], social-ecological metabolism [45,139,140], and many other human-nature frameworks [141,142], highlighting their importance to many fields of study [47,143,144]. It is a key requirement to capture the effects of ecosystem change on human wellbeing, and the resultant consequences of changes in wellbeing for ecosystems.…”

A brave new world: integrating well-being and conservation

“…Human well-being itself may have little policy traction with the conservation dialogue, but increasing conversations about the multiple feedbacks of coupled social-ecological systems and the pressure of policies associated with social justice render its consideration crucial (Dawson et al 2017). In this special feature, authors focused on locally conceived definitions of well-being and the implications of these definitions for a conservation intervention or outcome.…”

“…And Wali et al (2017) and Rodriguez (2017) demonstrate that monitoring and evaluation are evolving processes that must match the dynamics of communities; therefore participatory, collaborative tools that allow for adaptive integration of wellbeing and conservation can often be particularly effective. Dawson et al (2017) concur, emphasizing that subjective experiences must always be part of the measurement of well-being because conceptualizations that do not fully capture the dynamism of well-being (such as indicators) may paint a limited picture of trade-offs and create misleading implications for addressing them.…”