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Paper short abstract:

We investigate the extent to which 10 years of research on ecosystem services and poverty alleviation informs debates and tensions between environment and development agendas, and what this means for natural resource governance and sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

There remain unresolved tensions between environmental and development agendas regarding the use of ecosystem services and natural resources. We assess how recent research has addressed these tensions and explore to what extent it informs resilience and wellbeing and whether it identifies synergies and trade-offs. We synthesise and review outputs from more than 100 collaborative projects emerging from the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation programme to see how concepts of well-being and resilience have been analysed in recent research, how they might relate to each other and how they inform contemporary development.

We seek to answer core questions which are pertinent for natural resource governance: What are the trade-offs between resilience and well-being approaches? How can resilience building strategies affect well-being and of whom? Our research addresses the criticism that resilience thinking should take greater account of how adaptation strategies, which can build greater resilience, affect wellbeing outcomes, recognizing the trade-offs and decision-making that are involved in negotiating different pathways. Similarly, we also query whether resilience can strengthen our understanding of poverty dynamics and consequences of change in the context of a broad social-ecological lens.