Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.
n AbstrAct: Measuring progress toward sustainability goals is a multifaceted task. International, regional, and national organizations and agencies seek to promote resilience and capacity for adaptation at local levels. However, their measurement systems may be poorly aligned with local contexts, cultures, and needs. Understanding how to build effective, culturally grounded measurement systems is a fundamental step toward supporting adaptive management and resilience in the face of environmental, social, and economic change. To identify patterns and inform future efforts, we review seven case studies and one framework regarding the development of culturally grounded indicator sets. Additionally, we explore ways to bridge locally relevant indicators and those of use at national and international levels. The process of identifying and setting criteria for appropriate indicators of resilience in social-ecological systems needs further documentation, discussion, and refinement, particularly regarding capturing feedbacks between biological and social-cultural elements of systems.n Keywords: biocultural indicators, indicator sets, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, resilience, sustainability, well-being Indigenous and other place-based, local communities increasingly face an assortment of externally codified development and sustainability goals, regional commitments, and national policies and actions that are designed, in part, to foster adaptation and resilience at the local level. Resilience refers to the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and disturbances and to catalyze renewal, adaptation, transformation, and innovation (Béné et al. 2013). Identifying and setting criteria for the underlying factors that confer resilience to a community are the first steps toward effectively aligning external sustainability-seeking processes, often associated with resourcing mechanisms, with locally relevant and locally embraced approaches to sustaining environmental health and community well-being in the face of environmental, social, and economic change (Fazey et al. 2011;Folke et al. 2003).
Achieving sustainable development globally requires multilevel and interdisciplinary efforts and perspectives. Global goals shape priorities and actions at multiple scales, creating cascading impacts realized at the local level through the direction of financial resources and implementation of programs intended to achieve progress towards these metrics. We explore ways to localize global goals to best support human well-being and environmental health by systematically comparing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with regionally-derived well-being dimensions that encompass components of social-ecological resilience across the Pacific Islands. Our research shows that, in the context of the Pacific, there are overlaps but also significant gaps between regional conceptions of well-being and the globally-derived SDGs. Some dimensions, related to human health and access to infrastructure and finances, are well represented in the SDGs. Other dimensions of high importance when localizing perspectives of well-being, such as those regarding connections between and across people and place and Indigenous and local knowledge, are not. Furthermore, internationally generated indicators may result in trade-offs and measurement challenges in local contexts. Creating space for place-based values in global sustainability planning aligns with international calls for transformational changes needed to achieve global goals. We identify challenges in applying SDG indicators at the local level and provide lessons learned to foster equitable and holistic approaches and outcomes for sustainability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.