Comments Sheet【PR】
February 26, 2015
Title of the Project
Research Term

Biodiversity-driven Nutrient Cycling and Human Well-being in
Social-Ecological Systems
PRProject Leader

OKUDA Noboru

General advice and comments of the PEC:
The members of the PEC were generally satisfied with the report, presentation and progress of theproject. Clearly, considerable work has been undertaken during the short pre-research phase and thecontours of the project are taking concrete shape. The addition of a field site in the Philippines has
strengthened the international character, although this will still need to be taken further and the rationalefor the site selection can also be strengthened. Furthermore, the PEC wonders what framework will be
used for the comparison between the cases and for generalizing the site-based findings. A key questionis how to ultimately reach conclusions at the global level, which is a stated project objective.
While increasing community participation was noted with approval, compared to the research onnutrients, the community research is still a weak area, in terms of conceptualization, its relation with thenutrients work, and of economic tradeoffs and institutions. In order to enhance the community research,
the social science side of the research will need even more attention. Society needs to be placed at thecenter of the problem conceptualization and this requires a very clear research methodology to collectoriginal data regarding society at different levels. Some strengthening of the team and if possible
external advice is probably needed. Please keep in mind the RIHN philosophy of environmental
problems as being rooted in human culture.

Reply
C1: Weakness in governance and community researches
A1: We have made great efforts for designing our governance research since the pre-research phase.
Through Full Research Year 1, we will launch the field survey for some of the local communities(defined as a term similar to ‘hamlet’ in other countries) in the Lake Biwa Watershed to understand how
different types of commons have been governed by different local communities from upstream throughdownstream to coastal areas across a longitudinal gradient of the watershed and describe how theirgovernance is altered through interactions among a variety of stakeholders including our scientists,

according to Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) as well as to Institutional Analysis andDevelopmental (IAD) Framework. We will also use Social-Ecological System (SES) Framework toanalyse cross-scale linkages of the governance within and between watershed systems. We regard theLake Biwa Watershed and the Laguna de Bay Watershed as two extremes across a variety of watershedsystems in Asia: in the former, the society prefers to solve eutrophication with the most advanced
technology and environmental policy, whereas the latter suffers from the most serious pollution andenvironmental degradation due to nutrient loadings under poverty and overpopulation. Using these threeframeworks, we will generalize our findings from case studies on the watershed governance to feedback
to the solution of nutrient-derived environmental issues specific to each watershed system in different
regions of Asia. We hope to show the preliminary results from our community researches in the next
presentation.
C2: Research design for evaluation of human well-being
A2: We will take mainly two approaches: one is the qualitative analysis to identify critical natural
capital (CNC) for each community through semi-structured interviews with the community membersand text coding based on the grounded theory approach, and the other the is quantitative analysis toelucidate relationships between the CNC and human well-being, applying methods as such developedin environmental/ecological economics. We will examine how individual well-being (or happiness)would be enhanced not only by sharing knowledge on biodiversity and its critical values (i.e., CNC)
among a member of local community but also by involving a variety of stakeholders in thecommunity-based governance of CNC. More important is to monitor temporal changes in individual
happiness in the context of local communities rather than by the use of its universal measure. We will
also examine if the individual happiness at the local level is reconciled with collective happiness, whichis scored by a representative sample of citizens at the watershed level, through our multi-levelgovernance.
C3: Top-down and bottom-up approaches
A3: Although we stressed the importance of bottom-up approaches in our watershed governance, i.e.,
community-based governance, in the previous presentation, this does not always mean that we take only
a bottom-up approach or a local level approach. We are collaborating with many administrators from avariety of municipal and prefectural sectors as a project member or a key stakeholder of the watershed
governance. On the one hand, we try to empower citizens in the community-based governance on thelocal scale. On the other hand, we try to discuss institutional designs with policy-makers at thewatershed level. One of our roles is to facilitate cross-linkages of the multi-level governance to enhancebiodiversity-driven nutrient recycling and human well-being through dialogue among a variety ofstakeholders. Our trivial but steady progress is that some of administrators have recognized theimportance of community-based approaches through their learning and involvement, which may be fed
back to the governmental institutions in the future. The ultimate goal of our transdisciplinary science isto integrate new environmental knowledge toward recycle-oriented society for our sustainability
through a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches of the watershed governance.
C4: Linking between nutrient research and community research
A4: Human-kind perceives environmental changes through alteration of natural objects (defined as
biodiversity in our project), which are closely related to their lives and livelihood, but not throughchanges in invisible elemental composition and cycling. On one hand, biodiversity is important as acriterion for the community-based governance of CNC, which might enhance the individual happiness.
On the other hand, nutrient recycling on the watershed scale is essential to sustainability of our society,which might enhance the collective happiness or the public good. The community-based governancecan enhance the collective happiness as well as the individual happiness if local and scientificknowledge are integrated to show that biodiversity creates cultural values while it drives nutrient
recycling as an important component of ecosystem services for the watershed society. We will facilitate
dialogue and social learning among a variety of stakeholders in order to increase three indices, i.e.,
biodiversity, nutrient recycling and human well-being.
C5: A roadmap to the research goal on the global scale
A5: We can practice our multi-level governance only in a limited number of watershed systems,
because of logistic constraints in our project. However, our method will be applied to other watershedsystems if we can demonstrate that our governance approach is useful and feasible for every society andcountry. In practice, some research groups have already got interested in our governance approach andjoined us to apply it to their focal watershed systems. The most important is to practice the governancein the way adaptive to each watershed system because solution strategy is quite different from place toplace. The promotion of the adaptive watershed governance and its international networking is the only
way to solve nutrient-derived environmental issues on the global scale. We cannot believe that thetop-down oriented intergovernmental approach is effective in the global solution exclusively, as
suggested by stagnation of the IPCC.