Whose Cultural Ecosystem Service Values Matter? Exploring Power Inequities in Diverse Mangrove Communities

Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are often contextualized as intrinsically derived or as providing important non-monetary benefits, which many argue are discounted, improperly categorized, disregarded, or inadequately converted into direct monetary values. Assessing and communicating CES benefits with nuance is even more difficult when considering different cultural values held within a community. Drawing on frameworks that center culture, equity, and power, we conducted a CES evaluation of mangrove ecosystems in Bocas del Toro (BDT), Panama via semi-structured interviews with individuals from culturally diverse groups. Our study is one of the first to examine mangrove CES from the perspective of different stakeholder groups while also including dimensions of equity and power to better understand how they are understood and accessed differently by diverse users who interact with these ecosystems. Our results show that mental health benefits are multi-dimensional, experienced differently across stakeholder groups, and should be considered a dominant CES that deserves more dedicated attention. Findings also suggest that the loss of CES benefits in the context of ecosystem loss represents an important form of ecological grief. Finally, our findings support the ongoing calls for inclusion of local and Indigenous voices when designing, developing, and steering CES-based research to more adequately identify the needs of individual communities but also for our collective survival.