NRDC respond to SES change partly through their livelihoods. Ecosystem services, particularly provisioning goods, form a vital component of NRDC and household livelihoods, the access to and distribution of which helps to shape a household’s ability to respond to SES change. Hence, livelihoods are linked to the distribution of adaptive capacity partly through the ecosystem services necessary to respond to SES disturbance. Exploring the use of ecosystem services in MRDC livelihoods can provide insights into the environmental justice aspects of adaptive capacity.
2.5.1 Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living (Chambers and Conway 1992). Assets are the tangible and intangible resources, categorised by Scoones (1998) as natural, social, financial, physical and human capitals, which households draw upon to make a living. The mix of assets and activities a household selects denotes the livelihood strategy (e.g.
subsistence production, market production, off-farm waged labour) (Scoones 1998).
Livelihoods are shaped by the changing natural environment and form within complex social, economic and political contexts; the shocks and stresses of which combine to determine the livelihood vulnerability context (Chambers and Conway, 1992; Scoones, 1998) and force adaptations in response to changing circumstances (Adger, 2000). For vulnerable households, disturbances are often intractable and relate to underlying socio-economic factors such as income level and dependency on and access to natural resources (Chambers, 1989; Shackleton and Shackleton, 2006). Scoones (1998: 2) states that “…a livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base”. This clearly resonates with adaptive capacity by its consideration of sustainable livelihood responses to SES change. The sustainable livelihoods framework (SLF) (Figure 2.2) incorporates analysis of the contextual factors of people’s lives (i.e. socio-economic, technological, demographic, and political); their access to and stocks of financial, physical, human, social and natural assets and their ability to employ these for productive use; the institutions, policies and organisations that shape household access to
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assets; and the problems and priorities people themselves identify, and the strategies they employ to meet these priorities (Ashley and Carney, 1999). Higher levels of adaptive capacity will reduce vulnerability and increase resilience of livelihoods to disturbance by enabling greater resource access, bundling, and sustainable application of assets, and provide flexibility through diversity of potential response options (Nyamwanza, 2012). This has implications for environmental justice as inequitable distribution of resources will mean those who are already vulnerable will lack access to the resources necessary to respond to SES change, and may therefore be unduly burdened with negative effects.
Figure 2.2: The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework. Source: DFID (1999)
Limitations of the livelihood approach include: neglect of power relations; neglect of the dynamics of social and environmental interactions; too narrow focus on the local scale; and a lack of consideration of networks, linkages and connections between and among levels of governance (de Haan and Zoomers 2005; Scoones 2009). These limitations are particularly important as they link to vital components of recognition and procedural justice (i.e. processes occurring at multiple levels of governance that exclude certain groups and exacerbate inequities in the distribution of adaptive capacity). The coastal communities of Vietnam exhibit relatively low levels of development, and the households living within these communities are engaged in a range of primarily natural resource based livelihoods, relying heavily on the goods and services that mangroves provide. Coastal development is severely impacting mangroves and the livelihoods of coastal communities, particularly the rapid growth of aquaculture. This can cause a significant divergence in the livelihood opportunities available to households within these communities (Orchard et al.,
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2014). Applying an integrated ecosystem service and livelihood trajectory approach to a study of MSES in Vietnam addresses the limitations of the SLF through consideration of the broad and dynamic social, political, economic and environmental processes that have shaped the current livelihood context of mangrove dependent households. This approach also contributes to our understanding of the distributional component of environmental justice aspects of adaptive capacity within MSES.
2.5.2 Ecosystem services
A large proportion of global ecosystem service flows originate within forests (Patterson and Coelho, 2009). Forest ecosystem services include provisioning goods (timber and non-timber forest products), regulating services (watersheds, carbon storage and sequestration), cultural services (spiritual, recreational and religious), and supporting services that underpin the delivery of all ecosystem services. Provisioning goods are
“…services supplying tangible goods, finite though renewable, that can be appropriated by people, quantified and traded” (Maass et al., 2005: 7), and support many rural livelihoods (Shackleton and Shackleton, 2004). Households in NRDC often rely on the delivery of provisioning goods in order to sustain their livelihoods, and will often increase their use of ecosystem services in order to respond to SES change (Shackleton and Shackleton, 2012).
Hence, the distribution of ecosystem services within a NRDC will partly determine a household’s adaptive capacity (Birkman et al., 2009). Understanding how the use and sale of provisioning goods is differentiated by socio-economic factors within NRDC can contribute to our understanding of the environmental justice aspects of adaptive capacity through analysing the equity in distribution of ecosystem services between and among NRDC livelihoods. This is an important contribution to knowledge because little research has studied the implications of socio-economic differentiation for the use of ecosystem services in NRDC (Carpenter et al., 2009), in particular regarding environmental justice aspects of adaptive capacity.
Limitations of the ecosystem service concept refer to its focus on current ecosystem benefits, and a failure to consider the complex interactions and dynamics of SES (Norgaaed, 2010). In addition, the value of ecosystem services to rural livelihoods is socially constructed and contested (Kepe, 2008). Focusing on measuring the economic value of ecosystems fails to recognise the political and social aspects of ecosystem service use (Brauman et al., 2007). Using a trajectories approach, as taken in this thesis, to analyse
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household livelihoods, can help to address these limitations by: providing a time dimension to ecosystem service distribution between and among MRDC; understanding ecosystem service use in response to MSES change; and aiding our understanding of how and why adaptive capacity is distributed the way it is within MSES.
2.5.3 Livelihood trajectories
Research suggests that the impacts of SES change are unevenly distributed, and concerns of equity dominate current debates about the positive and negative changes to ecosystem services (Kofinas and Chapin, 2009). Local equity may be undermined, or existing inequalities may be worsened, as SES change alters the distribution of ecosystem services (McDermott et al., 2013). Thomas et al (2002) have found that in southern Africa, households and communities are recognising new natural-resource use and livelihood opportunities in response to SES change, but that this can contribute to growing polarisation within NRDC due to the uneven distribution of ecosystem services. Linking a trajectory approach with the SLF provides a broader approach to the assessment of the distribution of ecosystem services and the environmental justice of adaptive capacity, as the ultimate success of societal responses to change will often depend on adaptive livelihoods (Nyamwanza, 2012). Much resilience research has shown the importance of learning from past exposure and responses to shocks and stresses in order to identify areas for current and future policy support (Carpenter et al. 2001; Fazey et al. 2007; Dixon et al.
2014). De Haan and Zoomers (2005) question the term ‘livelihood strategy’ for imposing an ex-post label on behaviours that are seldom intentional. They suggest ‘livelihood pathways’
to indicate the broader socio-political patterns of livelihood activities, acknowledging that livelihoods emerge not as rational responses to future certainties, but as incremental outcomes of behaviour embedded in a historical repertoire of possibilities through influence of other actors and structural constraints (Ansell et al., 2014). Analysing livelihood trajectories can help to understand how alterations in household access to ecosystem services due to SES change can influence livelihood options and the distribution of adaptive capacity over time, and the equity implications of this distribution for adaptive capacity.
A livelihood trajectory is defined as “…the consequences of the changing way in which individuals construct a livelihood over time” (Bagchi et al. 1998: p457). Trajectories rarely exhibit one-off decisions, and are more often a culmination of actions with greater or lesser strategic intent (Ansell et al., 2014). For example, NRDC may engage in multiple
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livelihood activities and strategies simultaneously, strategically or unplanned, in response to intertwined present and future needs and aspirations and shaped by wider social, cultural, political and economic factors operating at multiple scales. Acknowledgement is also given to relational aspects as these impose demands, expectations, desires and duties that mediate opportunities and the nature and trajectory of livelihood actions (van Dijk, 2010). A livelihood trajectory approach is applied here to explore life histories of individual households and their changing livelihoods in relation to specific needs contextualised in relation to local power dynamics (cf. Sallu et al. 2010). Hence, a livelihood trajectory approach allows close examination of the political, socio-economic and environmental aspects underpinning ecosystem service provision (Vilardy et al., 2011), and how the equity of ecosystem service distribution affects livelihood responses to SES change, which, in turn, creates winners and losers. Considering the distribution of adaptive capacity as a process helps to capture the dynamics that link the ability of households to respond and recover from disturbance in order to re-establish their livelihoods (Nyamwanza, 2012). This also feeds into the important and growing application of the livelihood trajectory approach (Murray 2001; de Haan and Zoomers 2005). Using ecosystem service and livelihood trajectory approaches to assess the effects of SES change on NRDC livelihoods allows us to understand the distribution of ecosystem services and what this means for adaptive capacity. The next section will outline the social capital aspects of adaptive capacity, and how social network analysis can increase our understanding of the recognition aspect of environmental justice.