Evaluating taboo trade-offs in ecosystems services and human well-being

Abstract

Managing ecosystems for multiple ecosystem services and balancing the well-being of diverse stakeholders involves different kinds of trade-offs. Often trade-offs involve noneconomic and difficult-to-evaluate values, such as cultural identity, employment, the well-being of poor people, or particular species or ecosystem structures. Although trade-offs need to be considered for successful environmental management, they are often overlooked in favor of win-wins. Management and policy decisions demand approaches that can explicitly acknowledge and evaluate diverse trade-offs. We identified a diversity of apparent trade-offs in a small-scale tropical fishery when ecological simulations were integrated with participatory assessments of social-ecological system structure and stakeholders' well-being. Despite an apparent win-win between conservation and profitability at the aggregate scale, food production, employment, and well-being of marginalized stakeholders were differentially influenced by management decisions leading to trade-offs. Some of these trade-offs were suggested to be "taboo" trade-offs between morally incommensurable values, such as between profits and the well-being of marginalized women. These were not previously recognized as management issues. Stakeholders explored and deliberated over trade-offs supported by an interactive "toy model" representing key system trade-offs, alongside qualitative narrative scenarios of the future. The concept of taboo trade-offs suggests that psychological bias and social sensitivity may exclude key issues from decision making, which can result in policies that are difficult to implement. Our participatory modeling and scenarios approach has the potential to increase awareness of such trade-offs, promote discussion of what is acceptable, and potentially identify and reduce obstacles to management compliance.

Elasticity in ecosystem services: exploring the variable relationship between ecosystems and human well-being

“…Heavy fishing effort by illegal beach seines, although damaging to the ecosystem, generate high volumes of low-value fish (McClanahan et al 2008), while protected areas, enforcement against illegal gears, and lower fishing effort increases catch rates, fish size, and individual fishers' revenues (McClanahan 2010). However, the gendered access conditions suggests that such ecological improvements might negatively impact the livelihoods of female traders because of lower total catches and a shift in catch composition to high-value species favored by male traders (Daw et al 2015).…”

“…Second, understanding the elasticities within different chains and distribution of benefits as illustrated in Figure 4 facilitates an assessment of trade-offs linked to different interventions. This information can be analyzed with decision makers, for example, through use of scenarios exercises or "toy models" and other interactive techniques (e.g., Daw et al 2015), to discuss the tradeoffs associated with different courses of action. This is particularly relevant to interventions such as Payments for Ecosystem Services, or Community-based Conservation, where simplistic assumptions about benefits and their distribution may lead to negative outcomes in terms of compliance and negate "success" in ecological and social terms (Pascual et al 2014).…”

“…The subjective and context-dependent nature of well-being suggests that participatory modeling may provide a means to better represent the right-hand side of the chain from Value to Wellbeing Contribution. For example, to explore the trade-offs between different stakeholders under scenarios of fisheries management in coastal Mombasa, outputs from ecological models were linked to a rule-based model describing the interactions between different groups of fishers, fish traders, and their well-being (Daw et al 2015). Other modeling approaches such as agent-based modeling (Murray-Rust et al 2013) also offer potential for disaggregating individual Shares and Well-being Contribution.…”

A review of ecosystem service benefits from wild bees across social contexts

“…Trade-offs often occur between provisioning ecosystem services and regulating or cultural ecosystem services (Meacham et al 2016). Trade-offs also occur between different ecosystem services and between the present and future supply of services especially when managing ecosystems for multiple ecosystem services and balancing the well-being of different stakeholders (Carpenter et al 2006;Daw et al 2015). An example in Southeast Nigeria shows how outright felling of trees could provide honey (Okoye and Agwu 2008).…”

Essays on marine resources conservation : macroeconomics and national accounting

“…A key question is then how to reach an equilibrium between coastal development and ecosystem conservation. Development and conservation could be both seen as part of the same basic infrastructure needed to deliver essential services in coastal areas (Emerton, 2014), but a number of more or less hidden tradeoffs are to be taken in account in such complex socio-ecosystems (Daw et al, 2015).…”