Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 22, Pages 6949-6954Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414900112
Keywords
coral reef fisheries; ecosystem-based management; participatory modeling; scenarios; gender
Categories
Funding
- Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) program [NE/I00324X/1]
- K. Brown's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Professorial Fellowship at the University of East Anglia [RES-051-27-0263]
- Department for International Development
- ESRC
- Natural Environment Research Council
- Strategic Research Programme EkoKlim at Stockholm University
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/I009604/2] Funding Source: researchfish
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/I00324X/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [NE/I00324X/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available