"Wellbeing is a state of being with others, where one's needs are met, where one is able to meaningfully pursue ones' goals, and where one is able to experience a satisfactory quality of life." (McGregor 2007)
This definition of wellbeing underpinned a recent empirical study of the social and cultural construction of wellbeing in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand (see the Wellbeing in Developing Countries ESRC research group WeD). A wellbeing framework provides a means to identify and analyze the full range of relationships between people and the natural resource: it explores fisheries livelihoods, individual needs and goals, and the wider social, political and cultural organization of fishing communities. It particularly highlights the fact that change in fisheries does not affect everyone equally (Bavinck and Johnson 2008, Coulthard 2008) and what results in improvements in one person's wellbeing may result in another's ill-being – the heart of the challenge for governance and policy is how to recognize and deal with wellbeing trade-offs, conflicts and hard choices.
Key Link - WeD - www.welldev.org.uk
"Governance is the whole of public as well as private interactions taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities. It includes the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions and care for institutions that enable them" (Kooiman and Bavinck 2005:17)
Interactive Governance theory offers a process for deliberating hard choices, primarily through reverting to a discussion of basic values and principles on which governance can proceed. It also works with the idea of moving from 'good governance' to 'good enough' governance and the subsequent implications of doing so.
Key Link - FishGovnet - www.fishgovnet.org
Social-ecological resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb shocks or disturbances and return to a system state where core features are retained. It is a measure of how well a system can self-organize while learning and adapting to new challenges.
The resilience perspective sees change, surprise, uncertainty, and cross-scale influences as defining attributes of social-ecological systems. In keeping with these characteristics, governance to build social-ecological resilience has to be adaptive, constantly adjusting to new circumstances and learning from successes and mistakes. The social-ecological aspect of resilience recognizes that all global systems are now influenced by humans and therefore ecology must include human impacts. Considerable effort has been made to develop an integrated social-ecological understanding within the resilience approach while recognizing the distinctive social-cultural-technological capacities of humans and our power to create rapid destabilizing change. Social-ecological resilience also observes that, just as humans have great impact on ecosystems at all scales, so too are humans profoundly influenced by ecological contexts. Social-ecological relationships are inextricable.
While still an area for focused research, there is arguably a close relationship between wellbeing and resilience. Wellbeing in the fullest sense requires that its foundations be resilient. The sustainable livelihoods approach provides an example of this relationship. An important dimension of poverty is the degree of vulnerability of poor households in the face of seasonal or unexpected threats to their food or employment security. The chronic tension associated with situations like these where households can be said to have low resilience erodes the wellbeing of household members.
Key Link - The Resilience Alliance - www.resalliance.org
Ecosystem services, as defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 'are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems'.
They include provisioning services, regulating services, cultural services and supporting services. Collectively, these services contribute to human well-being in terms of meeting basic material needs and providing people the ability to pursue those things that they value being and doing.
Key Link - Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
