Material poverty and subjective well-being

Poverty reduction strategies have focused on measuring material poverty, for example, headcount ratios and the number of people living below the poverty line, defined by the ability of the household to meet its basic needs. It is important to analyse such poverty lines in the context of transitory poverty, depth of poverty, inequality and multi-dimensional poverty. For example, households can move into, and out of, poverty over time, and as such, assessments consider the risk of falling into poverty (e.g. through sickness of the main income earner) (McCulloch and Baulch 2000). Another key dimension is the depth of poverty; a poverty line obscures the differences in conditions in households classified as under the line. For example, the ultra-poor (those in the bottom wealth quintile) tend not to benefit from poverty reduction strategies due to their marginalised position in society (Lenhardt and Shepherd 2013).

Furthermore, relational aspects are important given that absolute poverty often is less important in terms of a range of well-being outcomes than relative poverty (Cojocaru 2016). Decreases in average poverty can obscure, and are potentially outweighed by, increasing levels of inequality between and within nations, for example, measured through the Gini coefficient. Measures of material conditions are commonly supplemented by other dimensions of well-being such as health and education (Alkire and Foster 2011). Yet, poverty lines and headcount ratios remain key indicators: they are standardised measures of poverty, generated using easily and universally available data, that allow comparison between different places and allow progress to be tracked over time.

Such headcount ratios have been used extensively to investigate the link between natural resource use and poverty (Carter and Barrett 2006) and by the Bangladesh government in its own assessment of poverty (Toufique and Belton 2014). However, they do not address issues surrounding poverty dynamics or depth of poverty described above. The comparability of standard headcount measures aligned with culturally calibrated poverty lines leads. This study focuses on households and the distribution of poverty across social-ecological systems, but maintaining comparability with standard headcount measures and culturally calibrated poverty lines. Other studies focus beyond the household by examining dynamics within households to explain, for example, livelihood diversification and food consumption (e.g. Ellis 1998; Klasen and Lahoti 2016).

However, material conditions alone are not sufficient to create the ‘good life’; that is to say, high levels of welfare, or happiness, often termed subjective well-being. Subjective well-being represents “all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives, and the affective reactions to their experiences” (OECD 2013; p. 10) and is usually defined by a cognitive (evaluative), affective (emotional) and eudaimonic (meaning-based) elements. Development interventions aim to generate material well-being not for its own end but to improve wider subjective well-being (but the two dimensions only partially correlate (Diener and Tay 2015). Thus, it is crucial to measure not just material improvement but whether those material improvements are able to assist in the target population meeting their own life objectives. Subjective well-being forms one element of multi-dimensional well-being, along with health, education and good social relations, but is also impacted by these factors.

There are different approaches to understanding the subjective elements of well-being. Approaches that draw from economic ideas of happiness as welfare or utility analyse the relative value to the individual of different physical, social and psychological needs being met. They identify objective life domains such as health, income and relationships and focus on understanding their relative importance, as well as individual and group differences in preferences (e.g. Gough and McGregor 2007; Camfield and Esposito 2014; McGregor et al. 2015). Research that draws on Sen’s (2001) capability approach conceptualises human well-being as the ability to take part in society in a meaningful way. Here, subjective well-being results from processes such as equality of opportunity, personal freedoms, human agency, self-efficacy, an ability to self-actualise, dignity and relatedness to others (e.g. Nussbaum 2001; Markussen et al. 2017; Hojman and Miranda 2018). Psychological perspectives focus on individual differences in experiences of subjective well-being based on personality traits, inherited predisposition and previous experiences (e.g. Diener et al. 2017). Other scholars have stressed the importance of relational aspects that take into account that people are embedded in multiple different relationships and that levels of well-being are contingent on the context (White 2017).

In the absence of a straightforward way of assessing all these contributors to subjective well-being, self-reported measurements of global life satisfaction ask the person to make an overall assessment of how well they think they have met their own life objectives, weighting different elements themselves (e.g. Diener et al. 2013). Measures of reported life satisfaction allow for a simple quantitative measurement of subjective well-being that can be included in larger questionnaire instruments. For example, this scale has been employed to measure subjective well-being across a variety of poor and rich country settings in the Gallup World Poll (Helliwell 2003; Diener and Tay 2015) and the UK Measuring National Well-Being programme (Evans et al. 2015). These simple quantitative measures, while imperfect, allow collection of subjective well-being data to be compared with material measures (e.g. income, expenditure, assets). In this study, we go further to create a poverty line in reported life satisfaction using a 10-point scale and Gallup’s ( 2019) Struggling category. This enables us to directly compare between subjective well-being and headcount ratios of poverty that are widely used and accepted in policy circles, including in Bangladesh.

Ecosystem services

When discussing the well-being of rural populations and, in particular, those dependent on natural resources for their income, multi-dimensional well-being is constructed in the context of the environment and its changes (Schreckenberg et al. 2018). The concept of ecosystem services takes an anthropocentric perspective on the natural environment, making explicit the links between nature and human well-being. Thus, they are defined as the benefits humans gain directly or indirectly from the natural environment (Fisher et al. 2009). Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005), which brought the idea to prominence, four broad categories of services have been utilised—provisioning (e.g. food, water), regulating (e.g. climate, water, disease regulation), cultural (e.g. spiritual, aesthetic) and supporting (e.g. primary production, soil formation). Although, various authors have modified and tried to improve on this categorisation, for example, to better account for non-material services and better disaggregate the catch-all category of cultural ecosystem services (Small et al. 2017).

The ecosystem service concept is useful as an analytical framework for understanding how natural resource dependence interacts with poverty trajectories in low-income rural settings. This body of work has shown, in general, the importance of trade-offs over time and space (e.g. Rodríguez et al. 2006; Adams et al. 2018a) and the crucial role of procedural justice in ensuring positive well-being outcomes for natural resource–dependent poor (Schreckenberg et al. 2018). An ecosystem service framework has also shown the need to disaggregate by both the type of benefit gained from the ecosystem service (e.g. subsistence or cash benefits), different user groups (e.g. men or women), as well as by value of the service (Daw et al. 2011) and demonstrated that there is variation in the sensitivity of individuals’ well-being to changes in ecosystem services (Adams and Adger 2013; Daw et al. 2016).

Ecosystem services affect subjective well-being through their importance to the many life dimensions that people consider when assessing their well-being. For example, ecosystem services contribute to meeting basic human needs such as food and water security (Chaigneau et al. 2018), income and income security (Bhattamishra and Barrett 2010), the creation of safe and functional spaces in which to live (Summers et al. 2012), identity processes and the creation of meaningful spaces and practices (Adams and Adger 2013; Fish et al. 2016), as well as more directly through biophilia and the psychological benefits of proximity to nature (e.g. nature relatedness; Nisbet et al. 2011).

There is evidence on elements of subjective well-being in low-income settings (e.g. Camfield and Esposito 2014), on safety net and other social functions of ecosystem service-based livelihoods (Fisher et al. 2014) and on the importance of land ownership and access in mediating the poverty-ecosystem service relationship (Hicks and Cinner 2014; Fedele et al. 2017). The contribution of this research is at the intersection of these issues: a new quantitative assessment of the relationship of ecosystem service-related income, material poverty and subjective well-being, controlling for known mediating factors. Ecosystem services are operationalised through natural resource–dependent livelihoods, drawing on a standardised list of occupations used in Household Income and Expenditure surveys in Bangladesh.

Access: ecosystem bundles and social mechanisms

Ecosystem services are not randomly distributed but are jointly produced in bundles depending on the character of the ecosystem (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010; Martín-López et al. 2012). Bundles of ecosystem services form social-ecological systems as they are partially the result of human activities to mediate environmental variability and manage availability (Janssen et al. 2007). The bundles cannot be defined without accounting for the social system that exists to control access and extract benefit from ecosystem processes, dictating the rules of access to resources (Walker et al. 2004). The links between values attached to particular landscapes and livelihood systems (e.g. Fagerholm et al. 2016), and the contribution of cultural ecosystem services enjoyed at the landscape scale to well-being (e.g. Bryce et al. 2016), indicates that there is merit in a social-ecological approach to subjective well-being. Here, we take the concept of bundles of ecosystem services, combined with knowledge of resource-specific access mechanisms to define social-ecological systems. Research has focused on particular resources, yet livelihoods are diverse across ecosystem services and different services have different access mechanisms.

Access mechanisms

Even when an ecosystem service is available and present in the system, this does not guarantee benefits for people. In low-income, natural resource–dependent environments, various access mechanisms limit certain households from using ecosystem services (Hicks and Cinner 2014; Fedele et al. 2017) and a range of social processes attenuate or reinforce the benefits from ecosystem services. Social relations, through a moral economy of hierarchical structures, reciprocity and compliance with informal rules, allow those without formal property rights to ecosystem services to gain access (Wood 2003). Not all ecosystem services are available all year round, but there are seasonal cycles in the availability of certain species and in agricultural calendar (Khandker 2012). Credit is an essential means of accessing the capital required to access ecosystem benefits and to smooth over seasonal shortages; however, it often is obtained under exploitative conditions (Basu and Wong 2015). Migration is used as a livelihood risk spreading strategy to access alternative labour markets during seasonal fluctuations, as a short-term coping mechanism against shocks (Jülich 2011) and to overcome chronic livelihood insecurity (Islam and Herbeck 2013). Finally, benefits from ecosystems accrue up the supply chain such that those involved with direct collection can benefit least from those resources (Islam 2010).

Ganges-Meghna-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh

The research took place in the south and south-west coastal zone of Bangladesh. Delta ecosystems play a major role in agricultural production and food security in their regions and are sites of land use change and conflict. Deltas are highly exposed to coastal flooding and salinity intrusion (Giosan et al. 2014) and vulnerable to climate and human-driven environmental change (Renaud et al. 2013; Tessler et al. 2015). Yet, they are also attractive places for human habitation due to fertile soils, flat topography and strategic locations on the coast. Deltas are often identified as unique social-ecological systems separate from other coastal areas because of their low-lying topography, high population density, fertile soils, and high levels of exposure to extreme weather, sea-level rise and infrastructural interventions such as upstream damming, coastal embankments and aquifer depletion (e.g. Brondizio et al. 2016).

However, due to their dynamic biophysical nature, deltas are also themselves composed of multiple social-ecological systems (Barbier et al. 2011). Here, we employ the categorisation of social-ecological systems detailed in Adams et al. (2016a, 2018b) to incorporate social-ecological systems into our analysis. Their definition is based on differences in bundles of ecosystem services, levels of access, the social mechanisms used to access ecosystem services, environmental degradation caused by exploiting those services and the levels of livelihood diversification across seasons and between livelihood types. Rain-fed agriculture dominates spatially, but other key systems are, irrigated agriculture, freshwater prawn aquaculture, saltwater shrimp aquaculture, eroding islands (char lands), Sundarban mangrove forest and offshore fisheries.

Bangladesh has relatively positive health outcomes, high relative literacy and has reduced mortality from natural hazards despite very low average incomes, persistent poverty and exposure to natural hazards (Chowdhury et al. 2013). However, studies in Bangladesh show low levels of reported life satisfaction and low positive affect (Asadullah and Chaudhury 2012; Mahmud and Sawada 2018). Yet, the nation has always been associated with happiness levels higher than the material conditions of its population may suggest. While the poor adapt their life expectations to the reality they face (e.g. Clark 2012), this apparent contradiction may also reflect that the Bangladeshi poor prioritise a range of life domains beyond income (Camfield et al. 2010).