Ecological functions and functionings: towards a Senian analysis of ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyze environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services-based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even restricting, development outcomes. This paper seeks to connect environmental analysis with development outcomes better by applying the Capability Approach of Amartya Sen and others to demonstrate how scientific analysis of ecosystem services sometimes conflates pathways of ecosystem management with development outcomes, but can be reconfigured to include more diverse values and objectives. The paper argues that ecosystem services should be identified more as ‘functionings’ (in the Senian sense of valued development outcomes) rather than ‘functions’ (in the sense of biophysical, apolitical ecosystem properties) in order to indicate that ‘services’ always reflects social values, and that values and scientific explanations of underlying biophysical properties evolve together. Environmental science for socially valued outcomes such as ecosystem services is therefore an important site of political inclusion and exclusion. The paper illustrates this analysis with examples of ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change from the World Bank and government of Bangladesh, and in contrast to differing approaches from the field of sustainability science.