Sarah Coulthard

Newcastle University | NCL · School of Marine Science and Technology

Against a backdrop of international commitment to establish effective marine protected area networks, UK marine policy is increasingly ambitious in its scope to designate a higher quantity and quality of marine protected areas. This ambition is not without challenge and controversy in an island nation with multiple competing demands spanning shippi...

Securing well-being and building resilience in response to shocks are often viewed as key goals of sustainable development. Here, we present an overview of the latest published evidence, as well as the consensus of a diverse group of scientists and practitioners drawn from a structured analytical review and deliberative workshop process. We argue t...

Introduction There is now an established argument that public policy should focus on conditions necessary for people's wellbeing as well as those for economic growth (McGregor, 2007; Bache and Reardon, 2013). In 2009, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance (Stiglitz et al, 2009) published an influential report which argued that t...

This chapter examines the wellbeing of residents in a former mining community in North East England. It illustrates how a social wellbeing framework can be used to investigate the psychological, relational and material dimensions of wellbeing to offer a complex picture of how wellbeing is experienced by local people and structured by various social...

This book offers unique insights into happiness and wellbeing as well as the challenges facing happiness researchers. A wide range of academics discuss their ethnographic, biographical and life history projects illustrating some of the difficulties of developing critical, qualitative approaches to wellbeing research. The book focuses on the everyda...

Urbanization is a key driver of social and environmental change world‐wide. However, our understanding of its impacts on the multidimensional well‐being benefits that people obtain from ecosystems remains limited. We explored how the well‐being contributions from land‐ and seascapes varied with urbanization level in the Solomon Islands, a fast‐urba...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) principle of “leaving no one behind” focuses global attention on the poorest and most vulnerable people. As different sectors grapple to engage meaningfully with this principle, we posit that greater consideration of social problems in fishing-dependent communities, such as alcoholism and domestic violenc...

Despite extensive recent research elucidating the complex relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing, little work has sought to understand how ecosystem services contribute to wellbeing and poverty alleviation. This paper adopts concepts from the "Theory of Human Need" and the "Capability Approach" to both identify the multitude of...

This document presents the results of an expert knowledge elicitation workshop which identifies policy mechanisms of relevance to the issue of mosquito net fishing across the relevant sectors of public health, fisheries management, development and conservation. A synthesis of current policy and future recommendations is contextualised within the re...

Conservation managers frequently face the challenge of protecting and sustaining biodiversity without producing detrimental outcomes for (often poor) human populations that depend on ecosystem services for their well‐being. However, mutually beneficial solutions are often elusive and can mask trade‐offs and negative outcomes for people. To deal wit...

Introduction: Interrelated social and ecological challenges demand an understanding of how environmental change and management decisions affect human well-being. This paper outlines a framework for measuring human well-being for ecosystem-based management (EBM). We present a prototype that can be adapted and developed for various scales and context...

Motivated by growing concern as to the many threats that islands face, subsequent calls for more extensive island nature conservation and recent discussion in the conservation literature about the potential for wellbeing as a useful approach to understanding how conservation affects people's lives, this paper reviews the literature in order to expl...

Although ecosystem services are increasingly recognized as benefits people obtain from nature, we still have a poor understanding of how they actually enhance multidimensional human well-being, and how well-being is affected by ecosystem change. We develop a concept of "ecosystem service elasticity" (ES elasticity) that describes the sensitivity of...

Social indicators, both mature and emerging, are underused

This handbook serves as a generic methods toolkit to help explore the nature of wellbeing in the context of fisheries. It details the application of a 3D wellbeing approach, which assesses wellbeing in terms of material, social and cognitive dimensions, and draws on recent research in Sri Lanka as a real world example to demonstrate how data can be...

The renewed focus on human wellbeing in international policy and academic debate encourages us to think again about how quantitative and qualitative methods are combined in understanding development and poverty. During the 2000s the Q- Squared movement provided a wide range of valuable and insightful material that explored the possibilities for and...

Social adaptation is often touted as a desirable and necessary response to continued decline in the fisheries sector, however little is currently understood about the impacts of adaptive strategies on people's broader sense of ‘wellbeing’, or how the spread of impacts affect people in different ways. This article draws from research in Northern Ire...

Significance Environmental management inevitably involves trade-offs among different objectives, values, and stakeholders. Most evaluations of such trade-offs involve monetary valuation or calculation of aggregate production of ecosystem services, which can mask individual winners and losers. We combine a participatory, modeling, and scenarios appr...

The framework for wellbeing, on which this methods handbook is based, defines wellbeing as: ‘a state of being with others, which arises where human needs are met, where one can act meaningfully to pursue one’s goals, and where one can enjoy a satisfactory quality of life’ (McGregor 2008, see also Coulthard et al. 2011). In this definition three in...

This presentation will focus on a collection of research from lagoons around the world, which relates to ways in which people live with dynamic and often unpredictable environments of lagoon systems. By focusing on lagoons as an integrated social-ecological system it aims to contribute to the understanding of how societies respond to, and deal with...

Over the last decade, the concept of well-being has experienced a surge of interest in international development debate about how it might offer a holistic, people-centred, and perhaps more meaningful interpretation of development and progress, which moves us beyond narrow economic measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) (Gough and McGregor 2...

Coastal lagoons play a critical role in providing fishery-based livelihood opportunities for a vast majority of people, and offer essential habitat for a range of coastal, marine and lagoon species. They are also host to a good part of our planet’s biodiversity. Consequently, lagoon social-ecological systems continue to be major attractions from th...

The linkage between ecosystems and human well-being is a focus of the conceptualization of "ecosystem services" as promoted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. However, the actual nature of connections between ecosystems and the well-being of individuals remains complex and poorly understood. We conducted a series of qualitative focus groups wi...

This paper introduces a 3-dimensional framework for exploring social wellbeing which combines objective, relational (social) and subjective dimensions – arguing that all three are necessary for a fully rounded notion of wellbeing. The paper first describes how this 3D framework was operationalized to empirically research wellbeing in fishing com...

This paper addresses the often overlooked, but significant, problem of alcohol and drug abuse in fishing communities and its impact on women’s wellbeing and social wellbeing more generally. We start with a global overview of the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse in fishing communities around the world and discuss alcohol’s historical and cul...

This paper introduces a 3-dimensional framework for exploring social wellbeing which combines objective, relational (social) and subjective dimensions – arguing that all three are necessary for a fully rounded notion of wellbeing. The paper first describes how this 3D framework was operationalized to empirically research wellbeing in fishing com...

The concept of 'wellbeing' is increasingly visible in a range of public policy and debate. This paper gives an overview of how wellbeing has influenced policy in the domains of health and international development, and draws from these insights to suggest the relevance and contribution of wellbeing to sustainable fisheries. The paper describes the...

In the midst of a global fisheries crisis, there has been great interest in the fostering of adaptation and resilience in fisheries, as a means to reduce vulnerability and improve the capacity of fishing society to adapt to change. However, enhanced resilience does not automatically result in improved well-being of people, and adaptation strategies...

The Padu system of South Asia has received growing attention as an example of customary marine tenure that has survived despite rapid development and change throughout the region’s fisheries. This paper describes the Padu system as it functions at Pulicat lagoon, India, where it has enjoyed decades of legitimacy amongst its members, and has contrib...

Marine conservation is often criticized for a mono-disciplinary approach, which delivers fragmented solutions to complex problems with differing interpretations of success. As a means of reflecting on the breadth and range of scientific research on the management of the marine environment, this paper develops an analytical framework to gauge the fo...

Adapting to climate change is a critical problem facing humanity. This involves reconsidering our lifestyles, and is linked to our actions as individuals, societies and governments. This book presents top science and social science research on whether the world can adapt to climate change. Written by experts, both academics and practitioners, it ex...

Despite international focus on how to facilitate adaptation to climate change, a good deal of adaptation will, inevitably, be enacted by households and communities at the local level. This paper provides an account of adaptation among villages in a south Indian fishery. Pulicat lagoon is presented as a system of dynamic environmental trends and sho...

"Community adaptation to environmental and social change has often been a catalyst for evolution in common property resource (CPR) institutions. With increasing fragility of many traditional forms of natural resource management, understanding how communities are further reacting to, and evolving with, change in common property resources and the ins...