Ecosystem Services, Wellbeing and Justice: Developing Tools for Research and Development Practice

The management of ecosystems in the Global South often involves tradeoffs between the conservation of global ecosystem services (ES, e.g. biodiversity), on the one hand, and provision of ES (e.g. food) and protection from ecosystem disservices (ED, e.g. crop raids) for local people. In our ESPA-funded 'Just Ecosystem Management' research, we found that the use of justice analyses improved our conceptual understanding of such tradeoffs and provided theoretical insights into how we might work to resolve them. In this proposed follow-on project, we combine the insights on justice with recent innovations in wellbeing research, translate this novel conceptual approach into a robust strategy for empirical research and develop research tools for the wider ESPA community. The underlying rationale is that an equitable distribution of ES and ED, meaningful participation of poor people in management decisions and recognition of their knowledge and experiences creates positive impacts on the contribution of ES to poverty alleviation.

We build on knowledge of the Nam Et Phou Loeuy region in northern Laos accumulated under the I-REDD+ Project and a comparison of three governance interventions intended to reconcile global and local ES (resettlement, use combined with protection, tourism revenue sharing). We provide complementary, multidisciplinary data by applying the following main research questions in four sites:
(1) What ES and ED are present at the landscape scale?
(2) How does availability and use of ES/ED differ between sites with different interventions and for different stakeholders?
(3) How has availability and use of ES/ED changed over the preceding 13 years, and to what extent have the interventions caused the changes?
(4) What are local stakeholders' notions of wellbeing and justice, both individually and collectively, with particular regard to ES and ED?
(5) How do people perceive changes in their individual wellbeing? What contributions do ES make to wellbeing, what harms do ED create, and how has this changed?
(6) How do different stakeholders (collectively and individually) and experts evaluate different forms of interventions to be just or unjust, and how do their evaluations relate to wellbeing outcomes?

The project will produce four main outputs for ESPA research:
1) Empirical insights on how different interventions designed to reconcile local and global ES affect the contributions of ES to poverty alleviation.
2) Tools for wider research on the contributions of ES to poverty alleviation appropriate to remote areas of the Global South, including:
- Disaggregated ES and ED inventory
- Guidelines for expert justice assessments of ecosystem management
- Protocol for participatory workshops on ES, wellbeing and justice
- Interview guide on ES, wellbeing and justice
3) Data sets on ES/ED and their effects on wellbeing.
4) The Participatory Ecosystem Services Inventory Tool (PESIT), which would allow local communities to identify and measure a range of ES/ED and map key stakeholders with support from external facilitators.

The research will be planned and tools designed alongside the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in consultation with local stakeholders including government officials, NGOs and researchers. WCS are a major global stakeholder in ecosystem management and are actively keen to be involved in testing of tools in their own sites in Laos and Cambodia and applying these tools to improve the effectiveness of interventions in including and benefitting poor and marginalised individuals and groups. The tool will ultimately be made available in the form of a manual, disseminated over the internet and through presentations at selected international forums. It is expected to be of direct relevance to the work of government officials, donors and NGOs in the Global South, thereby creating tangible benefits for poor people in low-income countries.

The proposed research seeks to achieve development impact by supporting managers of protected areas in the Global South in their efforts to reconcile conservation of global ES with provision of local ES. The intended impact is that poor people in low-income countries living near protected areas are more able to benefit from local ES, are empowered through the co-generation of knowledge on ES and realise greater participation in management decisions. This may be achieved as conservation and development practitioners recognize benefits of and have practical tools for incorporating justice concerns into ecosystem management, for involving poor people in identifying site-specific ES and promoting their participation in ES management decisions.

The research is intended to achieve impact through combining justice, wellbeing and ES in empirical research and promoting the application of these methods in ecosystem management through production of practical research tools. More directly, our research will generate impact through a) insights on how different types of governance interventions affect the contribution of ES to poverty alleviation and b) through development, testing and dissemination of a novel tool for participatory ES inventory.

The Participatory Ecosystem Services Inventory Tool (PESIT) can be thought of as a two-fold extension of participatory forest inventories. It will attend to the whole range of ES and disservices and will combine the identification of ES with the mapping of primary stakeholders. The tool will help ecosystem managers to involve local stakeholders in the co-generation of knowledge about ES, identification of tradeoffs encountered in ecosystem management and management decisions. The research partners will team up with NORDECO, a world leader on participatory forest monitoring, and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), a major global stakeholder in ecosystem management, to develop PESIT at two sites of the Nam Et Phou Loeuy National Protected Area in Laos. Development will involve coordination with partners, consultations at local and national levels, two trial applications at sites in Laos followed by refinement and a pilot test in the WCS project in Seima Protection Forest in Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia. The tool will be synthesized, published electronically and in print in English and Lao and results disseminated widely through the Monitoring Matters Network, at a workshop in Laos, at the Cambridge Conservation Forum and the 2014 World Parks Congress in Sydney.

The project is aimed at conservation and development projects worldwide, implemented by governments and international conservation organisations, such as WCS and WWF, in addition to governmental agencies, donors and international NGOs in Laos and other countries of Southeast Asia, such as the Lao Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and IUCN. 12% of the total project budget will be allocated to impact activities, including workshops and consultations in Laos, a presentation at the World Parks Congress in 2014 and an info brief on the just resolution of tradeoffs. We will also engage in website development (on the website of the Global Environmental Justice Group at UEA), blogs and various presentations to be made at the ESPA Global Forum and Cambridge Conservation Forum. UEA, University of Copenhagen and NUOL will also synthesize key insights on governance interventions reconciling local and global ES in support of poverty alleviation in an info brief in English and Lao. UEA will share its impact work at the ESPA Global Forum and work with the ESPA Directorate on other outreach activities.