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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sarah Coulthard
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© 2015, National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.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.
Author(s): Daw TM, Coulthard S, Cheung WWL, Brown K, Abunge C, Galafassi D, Peterson GD, McClanahan TR, Omukoto JO, Munyi L
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year: 2015
Volume: 112
Issue: 22
Pages: 6949-6954
Print publication date: 02/06/2015
Online publication date: 18/05/2015
Acceptance date: 01/01/1900
ISSN (print): 0027-8424
ISSN (electronic): 1091-6490
Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
URL: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1414900112
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414900112
PubMed id: 26038547
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