Connecting Marine Ecosystem Services to Human Well-being: Insights from Participatory Well-being Assessment in Kenya
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Connecting Marine Ecosystem Services to Human Well-being: Insights from Participatory Well-being Assessment in Kenya Caroline Abunge, Sarah Coulthard, Tim M. Daw
Abstract The linkage between ecosystems and human well-being is a focus of the conceptualization of ‘‘ecosystem services’’ as promoted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. However, the actual nature of connections between ecosystems and the well-being of individuals remains complex and poorly understood. We conducted a series of qualitative focus groups with five different stakeholder groups connected to a small-scale Kenyan coastal fishery to understand (1) how well-being is understood within the community, and what is important for well-being, (2) how people’s well-being has been affected by changes over the recent past, and (3) people’s hopes and aspirations for their future fishery. Our results show that people conceive well-being in a diversity of ways, but that these can clearly map onto the MA framework. In particular, our research unpacks the ‘‘freedoms and choices’’ element of the framework and argues for greater recognition of these aspects of well-being in fisheries management in Kenya through, for example, more participatory governance processes. Keywords Kenya Fisheries Well-being Ecosystem services
INTRODUCTION The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005) led to greater international recognition of the dependency of humans on healthy and functioning ecosystems. The MA was based on a conceptual framework which sought to more clearly establish how ecosystem services, defined in the MA as ‘‘the benefits people obtain from ecosystems,’’ relate to human well-being (MA 2003). The MA framework (Fig. 1) lays out four groups of ecosystem services:
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provisioning, regulating, and cultural services, which directly affect people, and supporting services needed to maintain the other services. Subsequently, these ecosystem services impact five inter-related constituents of human well-being: Security, Basic material for a good life, Health, and Good social relations. The fifth constituent Freedoms and Choice overlays all the other well-being categories since people’s freedoms, and the choices available to them, are influenced by, and have an influence over, the degree of well-being one achieves (MA 2003). Significantly, the MA highlighted the role of ecosystem services in enabling improvements in human welfare and as a necessary condition for poverty reduction and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MA 2003, 2005). Well-functioning ecosystems are therefore even more crucial to poor communities whose well-being is directly tied to the provision of ecosystem services through, for example, providing food security or livelihoods (Duraiappah 2004; Bizikova 2011). The MA’s conceptualization of well-being draws heavily from Deepa Narayan’s seminal research Voices of the Poor (Narayan et al. 2000), a large-scale participatory project funded by the World Bank in the run-up to the World Development Report 2000/2001 Attacking poverty. In response
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