Influence of identity on human well-being benefits of blue space

Abstract

Blue spaces, or the publicly accessible environments around and within oceans, estuaries, rivers, streams, and other waterbodies, provide benefits to human well-being. Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are a leading framework for understanding and assessing these benefits. CES are defined as services produced through the interaction of humans and nature that give rise to intangible benefits to human well-being. Sociodemographics and other forms of social and personal identity influence CES benefits, which are inequitably distributed to diverse populations. Environmental decision-making about blue space has the potential to help reduce or possibly exacerbate these inequities. Assessment of CES may help inform equitable environmental decision-making, but this application of CES assessment is challenged by a limited understanding of the complex ways that benefits of and barriers to CES are influenced by personal and social identity in diverse and multi-cultural communities. This dissertation addresses this gap by exploring the question of how benefits of and barriers to CES associated with blue space are associated with individual identity, defined as an individual’s personal characteristics and social group affiliations. We adopted a community-engaged, mixed methods approach in a case study of blue space CES in a Great Lakes coastal multi-cultural community. The study area included the communities of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior Wisconsin, and the entire reservation of an Ojibwe Tribal Nation. The study area is located within ceded territory in which the Ojibwe retain treaty rights to traditional lifeways. A community advisory group and an Indigenous advisory group helped develop, deploy, and analyze results of this study. We conducted a qualitative and quantitative survey of 532 study area residents, followed by thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with a subset of participants to assess multiple dimensions of CES. In this dissertation, we first address the process of navigating university openness in research policy and Indigenous data sovereignty (Chapter 1). We found that existing university open research policies do not account for the unique case of university research partnership with a sovereign tribal nation and need to be revised to fully support and facilitate research partnerships among universities and Indigenous communities. Survey (Chapter 2) and interview (Chapter 3) results demonstrated that social and personal identity fundamentally structure the experiences of blue space CES by individuals. Gender, age, life stage, ethnicity, income level, and health status, among others, influenced participants’ experiences of blue space. Highlighting the inherently relational nature of CES, our results showed that both benefits of and barriers to CES are emergent properties that arise from an individual’s perception of themselves relative to blue space. Challenging existing simplistic CES conceptual models, our results reveal the complex ways that identity informs the individuals’ perceptions about themselves relative to the environment over the course of life to give rise to, or to prevent, emergent wellbeing benefits associated with blue space. Our results demonstrate the importance of engaging and incorporating the perspectives of historically underrepresented and marginalized communities in blue space research and decision-making processes to advance the equity of CES benefit distribution, especially Indigenous organizations and tribal nations, due to the unique relationships Indigenous communities have with blue space.