Edited by: Edward Jeremy Hind-Ozan, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, United Kingdom
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Louise Freeman, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom; Caroline Hattam, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, United Kingdom
This article was submitted to Marine Conservation and Sustainability, a section of the journal Frontiers in Marine Science
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Ecosystem-based management approaches are increasingly used to address the critical linkages between human and biophysical systems. Yet, many of the social-ecological systems (SES) frameworks typically used in coastal and marine management neither represent the social and ecological aspects of the system in equal breadth or depth, nor do they adequately operationalize the social, or human, dimensions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s West Hawai‘i Integrated Ecosystem Assessment, a program grounded in ecosystem-based management, recognizes the importance of place-based human dimensions in coastal and marine resource management that speak to a fuller range of social and cultural dimensions of ecosystem-based management. Previous work with stakeholders in West Hawai‘i revealed noteworthy SES dynamics and highlighted both the importance and lack of understanding of the links between ecosystem services and human well-being, particularly services that enhance and maintain active cultural connections to a place. While cultural ecosystem services and human well-being are often recognized as important elements of SES, there have been substantial barriers to fully representing them, likely due to perceived difficulties of measuring non-material benefits and values, many of which are socially constructed and subjective. This study examined SES frameworks related to cultural ecosystem services and human well-being to advance the representation and operationalization of these important concepts in coastal and marine management. We describe key insights and questions focused on: (1) points of inclusion for human dimensions in SES models, (2) culturally relevant domains of human well-being and related indicators, (3) the importance of place and its interaction with scale, and finally (4) the tension between a gestalt vs. discrete approach to modeling, assessing, and sustainably managing social-ecological systems.
Ecosystem-based management has gained broad recognition as a crucial means to improve conservation and sustainable use of marine systems, through coordinated management of cumulative impacts from multiple sectors (
The Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) program was established in 2009 as one tool to help the agency move toward ecosystem-based management. IEAs have focused on large marine ecosystems, with the primary objective to provide a sound scientific basis for ecosystem-based management by synthesizing and providing “[…] analysis of information on relevant physical, chemical, ecological, and human processes in relation to specified management objectives” (
Developing measurable indicators for the human dimensions of SES has been challenging. Reviews of frameworks designed for broad ecosystem application have noted that most: represent the social and ecological systems in unequal breadth or depth; ambiguously operationalize social concepts (
Many SES frameworks take an anthropocentric perspective, viewing the ecological system as a provider of ecosystem services that support human well-being (
A growing body of literature also has focused more directly on development of human well-being indicators for ecosystem assessment and management (e.g., see
Both cultural ecosystem services and human well-being approaches to natural resource management recommend developing place-based indicators tailored to management needs due to the relational nature of environmental spaces, natural resources, cultural practices, and perceived goods and benefits (
Approximate geographic extent (blue line) of the West Hawai‘i Integrated Ecosystem Assessment. Source: Joey Lecky, Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, and NMFS.
West Hawai‘i is home to a highly productive and diverse marine ecosystem, supporting an abundance of tropical corals, reef fishes, sea turtles, cetaceans, and manta rays (
Given our research focus and location, we adopted the biocultural approach described above. Fundamental to this approach is respect for the plurality of priorities, worldviews, and governance systems through which stakeholders interact with resources and their management. Thus, we sought project consultants and community partners to help us better understand: how to appropriately integrate human dimensions into the West Hawai‘i IEA project; the most relevant potential human well-being indicators to pursue in more depth; and how management could more effectively develop the links between people and the coastal and marine resources in order to achieve a more sustainable outcome that balances ecological and human well-being.
We applied this approach to three activities: input from specialists; synthesis of relevant literature; and qualitative data collection through group discussions and pilot interviews.
We invited a group of mentors from various backgrounds to help guide the development of our project. These included six subject matter experts, two resource managers, and three local knowledge and community leaders. The subject matter experts were identified based on their experience and knowledge working in the following areas: cultural ecosystem services; sense of place; monitoring human well-being in conservation or natural resource management; and research or collaborative work with communities in Hawai‘i or indigenous peoples who rely on marine and coastal resources. The two resource managers have years of experience working in West Hawai‘i and are involved in day-to-day efforts bridging research, management, and community needs. The three local knowledge and community leaders were recommended by staff of conservation organizations in West Hawai‘i; had a strong connection with West Hawai‘i; and worked toward sustainable development, conservation of natural and cultural resources, or natural resource management.
Throughout the project, we sought feedback and advice from the mentor group as a whole or approached individuals as needed for their specific areas of expertise. Subject matter experts helped identify relevant sources of literature for review and provided input on our study design, data collection protocols, and methods. Managers and community leaders identified ways that IEA research can contribute to management and community needs, helped us identify communities that might benefit from this type of work, and helped build relationships with these communities who subsequently continue to partner in the research.
In addition to the project mentors, we involved over a dozen West Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i State resource managers in multiple ways. We discussed current and future goals of the management agency and identified gaps that should be filled; how our research could be tailored to address the needs of the local management and community in West Hawai‘i; challenges management faces when working with the communities; and their advice to our research project. We also attended local meetings to inform participants about the project and discuss relevant marine management issues. These meetings were intended to help build local support for future data collection and collaborative management.
We first searched the literature to understand how SES frameworks have been used to examine human well-being and cultural ecosystem services for natural resource and marine management. We focused on studies where social scientific methodologies might improve the representation of these concepts, especially related to measures of non-material elements and types of management interventions that might address them, as well as studies in Hawai‘i or the Pacific Islands.
We then selected 11 key references most relevant to the West Hawai‘i SES owing to their topical or geographical focus (
To learn from stakeholders and community members from West Hawai‘i how to better incorporate human well-being aspects in coastal and marine management, we held an informal session at the Symposium on West Hawai‘i’s Marine Ecosystem in Kona, Hawai‘i on December 6, 2017 and piloted a series of semi-structured informal interviews with community members.
The symposium was a free, 2-day event to which scientists, resource managers, and community members were invited to learn about ongoing research related to the regional marine environment. Our session was held over a 1½ h working lunch and was attended by approximately 25 individuals, primarily community members and resource managers. We began with a discussion of the ways in which human well-being is starting to be considered in ecosystem management and other IEAs, including the predominant depiction of human well-being as an outcome of ecosystem services. To begin to identify locally important connections between the marine ecosystem and human well-being, we then asked participants to reflect on the question “How does the marine ecosystem contribute to the things that matter most to the people in West Hawai‘i?” We discussed this topic as a group and participants submitted specific written responses anonymously. The session revealed the importance of thinking about place-based conservation at a finer scale within West Hawai‘i, described in the Section “Results.”
Using discussion from the session as guidance, we focused our project on learning from communities that have organized around the ideas of place and conservation. We created a set of considerations to help identify candidate places and communities as project partners (
Considerations for Identifying Place(s) and Community(ies) that can help ensure research process and outcomes have greatest benefit to all involved.
1. Well-defined or clearly perceived boundaries of place by the community |
2. Existing or reviving cultural and/or traditional practices or culturally valued locations |
3. Support of community groups and agencies to continue the above practices and locations |
1. High level of social cohesion and collaboration within the community |
2. Diverse perspectives and opinions being well represented |
3. Perception of community participation to other nearby communities |
4. Level of transferability and useful lessons to others (researchers, managers, community members) |
1. Possibility to build on existing relationships and strengthen trust between researchers and community |
2. Availability of local champions (i.e., mentors or partners who work closely with the community and researchers) |
3. Absence (or degree) of research/survey fatigue among community members |
4. Availability of literature and secondary data from same or similar locations to use, learn from and replicate |
5. Community |
6. Community |
7. Existing foundational research and management in the place and with the community |
8. Potential for future study |
1. Level of readiness of community members and leaders to work with resource management entities |
2. Historical or on-going collaborative management efforts and successes |
3. Management interest in conservation of particular place (e.g., aligns with management goals, ecologically or species-specifically significant) |
4. Potential future management activities |
We also used the consolidated list that resulted from our synthesis of relevant literature as the basis for an interview guide. We reviewed in detail and pretested the interview guide with several project mentors, other researchers who conduct similar work with communities in Hawai‘i, and community members. From April 23, 2018 to May 30, 2018 we conducted seven in-person semi-structured pilot interviews with leaders of communities in West Hawai‘i that were working in conservation and place-based management. We asked about their relationship with their community(ies) within West Hawai‘i, how they connect with the coastal and marine environment, their perception of the status of ecosystem, predictions they have for the future of their connections with the coastal and marine environment, and their thoughts on ways that science and marine management can help their community(ies) achieve its goals. Questions were open-ended and designed to gain a better understanding of the relevancy of each domain. Our consolidated list was used to prompt follow-up discussion, allowing us to compare topics that they brought up themselves vs. following a rubric. Interviews lasted from approximately 1.25–2.50 h and were audio-taped.
Preliminary analysis of pilot interviews was conducted by one of the authors using NVivo 12 Plus (QSR International Pty Ltd.), primarily to check the relevance of the interview guide and domains and attributes used as prompts. When a larger number of interviews have been completed, we will complete a full analysis of interview transcriptions and notes.
Combined findings broaden our conceptual framework for thinking about the role of social dimensions in the IEA. Future work will continue interviews with a more diverse range of participants to gain a better perspective of how the coastal and marine ecosystem influences and contributes to human well-being, and to identify specific indicators of cultural ecosystem services and human well-being for West Hawai‘i.
We present results in four main areas that improve frameworks to integrate the human dimensions of marine management into SES models for decision making: (1) insights on how to improve the representation of human dimensions within SES conceptual frameworks; (2) potential additional social indicators that might be included in West Hawai‘i SES models; (3) the importance of place in relation to cultural ecosystem services and human well-being; and (4) depicting reciprocal and holistic aspects of SES models.
We identified three areas where human dimensions, and in particular cultural ecosystem services and human well-being, were often underrepresented in the conceptual models used in coastal and marine and management: explicitly including the social system within analyses of the SES state; the interaction between biophysical and social conditions and ecosystem services; and the intentional use of socially oriented strategies to affect human behavior.
Many representations of SES in coastal and marine management use the term “ecosystem state” but measure only biological and physical ecosystem components. As previously mentioned, this approach assumes that with certain ecosystem states, an automatic flow of ecosystem services will result in human well-being. In this conceptualization, desired conditions (ecological health and human well-being) manifest at different points, where biophysical health is a relatively well-described and measured ecosystem state, and since human well-being depends on biophysical health, it is rarely measured as a separate outcome. IEA-focused models more clearly and intentionally ascribe human well-being at the same level of importance as ecological components (e.g.,
When viewed through an ecosystem services lens, explicitly considering the state of the social system (e.g., food production and market structure, cultural norms, household characteristics, resource governance system, etc.) led us to think about the ways that social conditions can interact with biophysical conditions to access the benefits of ecosystem services, which are rarely discussed in the literature. For example, even with a service as straightforward as food provisioning, the presence of abundant fish stocks may be necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure food security. Social conditions, such as availability of fishing gear, food distribution networks, access to fishing grounds, and adaptive capacity of fishers may affect the extent to which fish are actually received as food throughout a community (
Given the importance of social conditions on resultant ecosystem services, and therefore human well-being, we also noted that the representation of “ecosystem-based management” in models often did not explicitly discuss socially oriented strategies and outcomes, but rather focused on nature-oriented outcomes. In practice, managers often state, “We don’t manage fish, we manage people,” yet most models did not appear to have a clear way to represent management actions designed to affect the state of the social system that then cascade to effects on the biophysical system, although some ecosystem cascade models are including these reverse cascades (e.g.,
Our review of relevant literature and discussions with mentors resulted in a consolidated list of human well-being domains, attributes, and potential indicators related to cultural ecosystem services tailored to West Hawai‘i (
Human well-being domains, example attributes, and potential indicators for cultural ecosystem services in West Hawai‘i.
Domains | Attributes | Potential indicators of cultural ecosystem services |
---|---|---|
Heritage | Multi-generational interactions/connections with natural resources |
Transmission of knowledge or practices around deified ancestral guardians (e.g., |
Spirituality | Interacting with the landscape to perpetuate spiritual beliefs and practices (e.g., divine power) | Formal ceremonial practices (e.g., |
Presence and recognition of plants, animals, and elements that represent/symbolize deities | Creation and use of ceremonial garlands (e.g., |
|
Presence and recognition of familial guardians/ancestors; resources themselves recognized as kin | Recognition of deified ancestral guardians that are cared for by and take care of specific families (e.g., |
|
Sense of place and identity | Sense of self, community, and/or home related to the coastal and marine environment | Activities on the landscape; heritage, social, and emotional connections to places |
Presence of historical place-based names which describe the past and present of the coastal and marine environment | Place names; landscape terms; species names; environmental process names (e.g., rain names, wind names); transmission of existing or creation of new cultural proverbs to describe these observations | |
Engagement of families in coastal and marine resource based activities | Existence and availability of activities such as fishing or harvesting for livelihood or enjoyment | |
Presence on and interaction with lands that will remain secure (formally or informally) for future generations | Presence by lease, physical access, ownership, and/or occupation; customary rights and tenure | |
Education | Local knowledge about the coastal and marine environment | Language and/or culture encoded knowledge of seasonal patterns such as timing and intensity of rain and other meteorological phenomena or plant/animal behavior and reproductive cycles; place-specific practices associated with storied landscapes |
Knowledge transmission (place-based, observational, formal, informal, etc.) | Scientific research, experiential, land-based education, learning from elders, culture-based education (e.g., gathering salt from natural pools and making salt in raised ponds) | |
Presence of environmental signs or indicators (e.g., bioindicators) and the ability to recognize them | Species or environmental processes that signal the cycles of another plant/animal species (e.g., types of rainbows to signal events) | |
Social relations | Perpetuation of practices/skills that allow individuals to provide for and share with their families and community | Goods for household, sharing, and income; jobs that require knowledge of traditional practices or the discipline required; formal and informal apprenticeships; place-based fishing/gathering practices; community fishing endeavors; acknowledgment of young leaders |
Presence of strong social ties or networks; sense of community; trust in neighbors | Network of people to share with and receive from; gifting/exchanging of goods; joint family endeavors; communal child care; community spaces | |
Stewardship | Ability to care for resources and environment | Contributions of time, labor, and/or monetary support toward maintenance of public or private lands or specific sites; restoration and maintenance of sacred sites (e.g., |
Customary rights and responsibilities are locally known, practiced, and respected | Recognition and use of access restrictions, gathering rights, and easements related to traditional ownership or harvesting practices (e.g., |
|
Existence | Aesthetics | Recognition and practices around the appropriate maintenance of specific sacred sites; pride in community parks and coastal areas; beach clean up activities |
Inspiration | Broadly circulating public discourse about collective responsibilities (e.g., caring for place or |
|
Creativity | Local artistic or creative practices; moralization; poster competitions in schools | |
Governance and management | Political participation and equity | Participation in marine management decision-making processes and leadership; stakeholder processes; exercising rights/interest in politics; management reflects local and traditional values |
Effectiveness of management | Perceptions of management, permits, and regulation; adequate funding and staff capacity for achieving management objectives; partners and collaboration | |
Health | Physical and nutritional health | Outdoor activities that promote health and strength of body and mind |
Mental and emotional health | ||
Safety and security | Security and safety related to real or perceived environmental risks | Protection from threats of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. (e.g., level of social preparedness for natural disasters; access to social nets; availability and application of traditional knowledge to mitigate environmental risks) |
The definitions of cultural ecosystem services and human well-being emphasize the relationships and meanings derived from interactions with the environment. As described in
This focus on meanings, relationships, and importance of activities also underscores the usefulness of a bigger toolkit drawn from many social science disciplines to identify appropriate metrics for non-material contributions of ecosystems to human well-being. Primary data collection would be necessary for crucial indicators of the cultural ecosystem service aspects of well-being, such as range of emotional connections to places, amount of pride in community parks, or perceived degrees of protection from environmental risks. While these concepts refer to experiential phenomena, psychometric scales can be created to systematically evaluate the degree to which populations experience them. Additionally, place-based stories, ethnographic narrative, and qualitative analyses can provide in-depth understanding of the meaning of well-being and relationships between social and ecological systems (
As previously mentioned, participants in our informal session at the Symposium on West Hawai‘i’s Marine Ecosystem emphasized the importance of investigating place at a finer spatial scale. They were uncomfortable treating all of West Hawai‘i as one community, noting that specific geographies within West Hawai‘i will lead to different types of interactions between communities and marine resources. For example, the extent of coral cover or the influence of submarine groundwater on coral reefs near a community’s shoreline result in different ecological characteristics that are conducive to different types of activities and resultant meanings. Attending to place was not only a large part of the session dialogue, it was also reflected in a word cloud created from the written responses to the discussion question (
Word cloud of compiled responses from all participant responses to the question “How does the marine ecosystem contribute to the things that matter most to the people in West Hawai‘i?” All responses included are verbatim. Word size relates to frequency of word use.
There was an assumption by many that because the West Hawai‘i IEA is at a smaller scale than other IEAs (e.g., only one part of one state), it would be simpler to identify indicators of social phenomena such as human well-being. Yet, although relatively small in spatial scope when compared to other IEA regions in the United States, West Hawai‘i is comprised of multiple unique places which may require site-specific indicators. The West Hawai‘i IEA is improved by working closely with these unique communities to identify site-specific management needs. We observed that analogous to the way coastlines exhibit fractal characteristics, with similar spatial patterns revealed at different scales, stakeholder engagement exhibits similar fractal qualities. That is, stakeholder engagement to identify social indicators is equally complex at multi-state levels, vs. local place-based levels. However, the composition of stakeholders will change based on the management questions, which also vary by scale.
In addition to identifying the importance of place, participants in the symposium session also expressed concern with conceptualizing human well-being as an outcome of ecosystem services, as is often depicted in SES models. They explained that viewing human well-being in this way does not adequately convey the reciprocal connections between people and the land and ocean. As one participant described, “…if place is healthy we are healthy. We make place – place makes us. It is in us – our food, livelihood, identity, purpose in life.” Reciprocity was also evident throughout the interviews as the natural way that people talked about their relationships with the environment and/or how they connect with the environment.
Discussions about reciprocal relationships between people and the marine ecosystem led us to think critically about the linear or cascading models of ecosystem services that portray people primarily as negative stressors. Some SES models add people as beneficiaries of positive ecosystem goods and services to represent reciprocity (e.g.,
In addition, our work illuminated a tension between scientific models that parse out elements of the system and the more multivariate dynamics of human domains within the system. Interviewees rarely described a single human well-being domain when discussing interactions with the ecosystem, even when prompted with a question designed to relate to a single domain or attribute. While modelers tend to refer to considerations of a holistic system in terms of identifying all the discrete elements within the system, interviewees described a more gestalt experience where the elements were experienced as broadly interactive, as in
As natural resource managers increasingly move toward ecosystem-based approaches and SES frameworks, metrics of human well-being and cultural ecosystem services will be necessary to determine success of management interventions. Yet, there have been considerable challenges in including and operationalizing these concepts in SES models for coastal and marine management. This study contributes key insights and questions focused on: (1) points of inclusion for human dimensions in SES models, (2) culturally relevant domains of human well-being and related indicators, (3) the importance of place and its interaction with scale, and finally (4) the tension between a gestalt vs. discrete approach to modeling, assessing, and sustainably managing SES.
Our examination of SES frameworks identified several points where attention to human dimensions are typically under-represented. First, it is unclear when and how human well-being should be considered a social system state. On the one hand, human well-being may be considered the desired outcome of a management action, and therefore representative of the state of the social system. On the other hand, the state of the social system may be seen as interacting with the state of the biophysical system in delivering ecosystem services that affect human well-being. The conceptualization chosen has implications for identifying and monitoring indicators, as well as planning and implementing management interventions.
In addition, SES frameworks would benefit from more clearly including socially oriented strategies and outcomes. For much of natural resource management, including marine management, socially directed management strategies are often not explicitly designed to target behavioral change and positively affect biophysical conditions, but are instead limited to education and outreach to build awareness. Lack of exposure to social science disciplines may cause managers to overlook other promising and creative approaches to encourage conservation behaviors. For example, the discipline of conservation marketing is now being recognized as a key area of social science contribution to conservation practice (
In addition to broad SES frameworks, our consolidated list of human well-being domains, attributes, and potential indicators can help managers identify areas requiring actions to improve elements of well-being related to cultural ecosystem services. To effectively measure the effects on non-material aspects of these concepts, primary data may need to be collected, using social science methodologies. Researchers outline a number of techniques which draw from the full range of social science disciplines and practice areas, including topics as diverse as ethnography, economic valuation, deliberative governance, and participatory mapping (
When we started this project, there was an assumption that the smaller scale of the West Hawai‘i IEA, relative to other NMFS IEAs, would simplify stakeholder engagement. Yet, we observed that engagement with communities revealed fractal-like characteristics. Large ecosystem scale science and management (e.g., at state or large marine ecosystem levels) is understood as complex, yet smaller geographies (e.g., local and place-based systems) are no less complex, socially and ecologically. Instead, different management questions may be relevant.
Finally, our project is ultimately focused on eliciting specific social metrics of human well-being and cultural ecosystem services, which we believe must be included in scientific models if we are to more effectively and comprehensively assess SES. However, we also identified discrepancies in the way these models tend to portray the relationship between the social and ecological components of the system and the way they are experienced by community members. First, many models portray a one-dimensional view of reciprocity between human communities and marine ecosystems, which focus on benefits to people and may miss important considerations of vulnerability (
There were a number of limitations to this first stage of our research. First, while we focused on frameworks typically used in marine and natural resource management, we recognize that there is a large body of research around human well-being in other contexts from economic growth to international development (for review, see
Despite these limitations, our work enhances recent efforts to improve the representation of the human dimensions of SES. By advancing our thinking about the broad frameworks used to represent cultural ecosystem services and human well-being into SES models, we are improving the ability to achieve NMFS guiding principles related to ecosystem-based management, especially related to appropriate social indicators. Future work will apply these insights with partner communities to identify more specific indicators. We hope that our findings not only improve the ability of future models to assess status and trends of the full range of SES components, but also to holistically integrate human experiences into the management of marine ecosystems, large and small.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the University of Hawai‘i Institutional Review Board (IRB) with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The project has exempt status for Human Subjects Research from the University of Hawai‘i Committee on Human Studies (CHS) under the exempt project 19449, Socioeconomics of Western Pacific Fisheries.
KL and SW conceived the project, wrote the funding proposals, and developed and coordinated the project design and activities. RI was responsible for day-to-day project management, contributed significantly to project design, and conducted the literature review and interviews. KL and RI co-led the symposium session. AM and MP served as project mentors and helped shape the direction of the project. KL led the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed significantly to the writing of the manuscript.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
We thank our project mentors, participants in the lunchtime session, and interviewees, without whom this project would not be possible. We also thank NOAA’s Integrated Ecosystem Assessment for fiscal and institutional support, including the IEA Human Dimensions Working Group, other presenters/panelists and participants in the IMCC5 symposium where this work was presented, and two reviewers. All of those discussions and reviews greatly helped refine our thinking and writing. The opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government.