Capturing wellbeing – using a different approach to go beyond the preconceptions

 

‘Land is everything. Everything follows the land – whether livestock or infrastructure, they all require the land.’ - Participatory video participant from Kilambo Village, Tanzania

 

Many of the world’s poorest communities depend on the land for their livelihoods but understanding exactly how the environment influences their wellbeing goes beyond simplistic notions of income and material wellbeing. ESPA Fellow Nicole Gross Camp explains how a new approach could be used to explore this complex relationship and tests out a new tool with community-based forest management schemes in Tanzania.

 

 

Understanding the contribution of the environment to a community’s wellbeing is not a straightforward question. Traditionally wellbeing has been characterised using questionnaires with preconceived categories focusing largely on material or economic wellbeing - an important but not all encompassing indicator. The limitations of this emphasis are notable and perhaps exemplified in the case of asparagus production in the Ica Valley of Peru. 

 

Seeing the bigger picture: Why wellbeing is not just about income

 

Prior to the introduction of asparagus, the Ica Valley had one of the lowest per capita incomes in the country. Asparagus production was lucrative and led to an increase in the region’s income as well as provided people with more opportunities for improving their housing, education and even travel – it also, however, came with significant costs. Asparagus is a water-intensive crop so year-round production driven by Western consumers combined with the Peruvian government’s support of export-oriented agriculture led to drastic and dramatic reductions in the quantity and quality of water. Furthermore, water shortages in the valley have affected indigenous communities living higher up in the mountains – posing a real threat to their traditional livelihoods. In this example the emphasis on economic gain improved people’s income and arguably material wellbeing, but it is also an indicator and cautionary tale of the need to broaden our characterisation of wellbeing. 

 

New approaches to measuring wellbeing

 

To this extent, the Wellbeing in Developing Countries and Capability Approach have provided considerable insights into the multidimensional nature of wellbeing – with the former being particularly focused on poorer communities with high natural resource dependence. And yet, the methodologies implemented have predominantly remained the same – questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions. Whilst tried and true methods, I was interested in using a relatively novel, more inductive approach to characterise wellbeing. 

Participatory video participants from Kilambo brainstorm things that contribute to their wellbeing, hali ya maisha

 

Participatory video (PV) involves working with a sub-population of a community to create a video exploring a topic of interest – in this instance wellbeing and the environment. In addition to being a more evidence-based ‘bottom up’ approach, PV is largely controlled by the participants, amplifying local voices and creating an output that is potentially useful for more than just research purposes. Indeed visual methodologies like PV have a rich history of use and are sometimes referred to as ‘enabling methodologies’ based on their ability to create opportunities for exploration and understanding, expression and communication, as well as the discovery of limitations. 

 

Participatory video captures environmental links to wellbeing in the community-managed forests of Tanzania

 

I recently initiated participatory video in one of the eight communities where my ESPA research is based in southern Tanzania. The process involved an initial 5-day intensive workshop where participants were trained in the technical aspects of equipment use, followed by a series of exercises to draw out the components of wellbeing important to their community. These exercises lay the foundation for the development of a storyboard and ultimately, video. Four of the communities where I am working in Rural Iringa and Kilwa Districts were selected based on their presence of a community-managed forest – an additional four ‘control’ sites were selected using a matching protocol developed by ESPA project partner PIMA. 

The participants discussed their lives and what made them ‘good’ developing a list of activities and things that they deemed significant. Participants were united in the importance of land as is depicted in the following quote: ‘Land is everything. Everything follows the land – whether livestock or infrastructure, they all require the land.’ The film describes six of the characteristics of the community’s wellbeing including agriculture, education, health, livestock, the forest and infrastructure (eg road and communication) and will serve as the foundation for my second tier of research. Whilst this is the first of four participatory videos to be completed, I believe its ability to capture in a novel way community wellbeing has been accomplished – highlighting areas of importance to the local community, revealing a rich narrative of discussion in participatory exercises leading up to the production of the storyboard and video, and facilitating the creation of additional methods to examine wellbeing in more quantitative ways.

 

A tool for the future

 

In addition to providing me with a foundation of a community’s wellbeing, the film will also be a potential claim-making tool for the community or minimally a baseline on which to reflect in the future. The community has requested that the film be distributed to several other governmental leaders in the area. What might come out of these shared experiences remains to unfold, but it is my hope that these videos help to amplify the community’s voice, their respective state of wellbeing and concerns for the future to the leaders charged with serving them.