How can conservationists account for their impact on human well-being?

Milner-Gulland, EJ, McGregor, J.A., Agarwala, Matthew, Atkinson, G, Bevan, Philippa, Clements, T., Daw, T, Homewood, K., Kumpel, N., Lewis, J., Mourato, S., Palmer Fry, B., Redshaw, M., Suon, S., Wallace, G., Washington, H. and Wilkie, D (2014) How can conservationists account for their impact on human well-being? Conservation Biology, 28 (5). 1160–1166. ISSN 0888-8892

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Abstract

Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well-being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well-being and are starting to converge on a common understanding of how best to do this. In conservation, the term human well-being is in widespread use, but there is a need for guidance on operationalizing it to measure the impacts of conservation interventions on people. We present a framework for understanding human well-being, which could be particularly useful in conservation. The framework includes 3 conditions; meeting needs, pursuing goals, and experiencing a satisfactory quality of life. We outline some of the complexities involved in evaluating the well-being effects of conservation interventions, with the understanding that well-being varies between people and over time and with the priorities of the evaluator. Key challenges for research into the well-being impacts of conservation interventions include the need to build up a collection of case studies so as to draw out generalizable lessons; harness the potential of modern technology to support well-being research; and contextualize evaluations of conservation impacts on well-being spatially and temporally within the wider landscape of social change. Pathways through the smog of confusion around the term well-being exist, and existing frameworks such as the Well-being in Developing Countries approach can help conservationists negotiate the challenges of operationalizing the concept. Conservationists have the opportunity to benefit from the recent flurry of research in the development field so as to carry out more nuanced and locally relevant evaluations of the effects of their interventions on human well-being.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2014 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., on behalf of the Society for Conservation Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	development,ecosystem services,impact evaluation,intervention,poverty
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Related URLs:	http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	30 May 2014 20:36
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2022 06:16
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/48451
DOI:	10.1111/cobi.12277

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