Linking cultural ecosystem services with individual and collective wellbeing in recreational urban blue spaces: insights from Danang, Vietnam

Urban green and blue spaces contribute many non-material benefits to human wellbeing. However, there are many gaps at this interface including (a) unclear conceptualisation of the mechanisms mediating the linkages between the non-material benefits of Nature and human wellbeing, (b) disproportionate focus of studies on individual wellbeing than collective wellbeing, (c) lack of understanding of possible synergies and trade-offs between individual and collective wellbeing. Here, we aim to unravel the linkages between the non-material benefits of Nature with individual and collective wellbeing. We focus on recreational cultural ecosystem services (CES) from urban blue spaces in a rapidly transforming tourism-dependent coastal city in Vietnam. We elicit these linkages through in-depth interviews and deliberative focus group discussions (FGDs) with the local community, and systematise the linkages through causal loop diagrams. We find that recreational CES from blue spaces contribute to eight constituents of individual wellbeing, namely physical health, mental health, subjective well-being, spirituality, personal identity and autonomy, learning and capability, connectedness and belonging, and economic wellbeing. Recreational CES also contribute to five constituents of collective wellbeing, namely open communication, collective actions, communion, tolerance and distributive justice. We identify 12 mechanisms mediating these linkages, with the most important ones being regenerative, cognitive, cohesive, collaborative and destructive mechanisms. We also observe that recreational CES create synergies and trade-offs between different constituents of wellbeing. We particularly note trade-offs and synergies among constituents of individual and collective wellbeing such as trade-offs between economic wellbeing (constituent of individual wellbeing) and distributive justice (constituent of collective wellbeing), among others.