Bouncing back: recovery from the impacts of COVID-19 on human wellbeing in Kenyan coastal fishing communities
Sutcliffe, Sarah, Cinner, Joshua, Lau, Jacqueline, Muly, Innocent, Wanyonyi, Stephen, Mbaru, Emmanuel, Muthiga, Nyawira, and Barnes, Michele (2025) Bouncing back: recovery from the impacts of COVID-19 on human wellbeing in Kenyan coastal fishing communities. Regional Environmental Change, 25 (3). 107.
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic altered almost every aspect of people’s lives and undermined human wellbeing. Now that restrictions have lifted, we need to identify the lingering effects of the pandemic to strategically direct the ongoing recovery process. We conducted a mixed-methods longitudinal analysis of material, relational and subjective wellbeing in five coastal fishing communities in Kenya before, during and after the implementation of COVID-19 containment policies. We drew on qualitative analysis of interviews and quantitative analysis of surveys conducted with 32 fishers at three time points to explore how the pandemic affected wellbeing during the first year of the pandemic. We then used surveys conducted with the majority of fishers in each community in 2016, 2019 and 2022 to determine the scale of the impact of the pandemic proportionate to the impacts of ongoing changes in the communities. We identified a range of wellbeing impacts during the pandemic but also found that communities appear to be recovering. Although there were meaningful differences between our indicators of wellbeing immediately prior to (2019) and after (2022) the pandemic, our analysis leveraging data from 2016 suggests that these differences align with a longer-term trend likely associated with ongoing social-ecological changes. In all but one indicator (work enjoyment), we were unable to identify any significant long-term impacts of the pandemic on any of our wellbeing indicators. Our research provides compelling evidence of the capacity of coastal fishing communities to “bounce back” from the impacts of COVID-19, which likely has relevance for future shocks.
| Item ID: | 87823 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1436-378X |
| Keywords: | COVID-19, Material wellbeing, Relational wellbeing, Small-scale fishing, Subjective wellbeing |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. |
| Funders: | Australian Research Council (ARC) |
| Projects and Grants: | ARC CE140100020, ARC FT160100047 |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Feb 2026 07:08 |
| FoR Codes: | 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410404 Environmental management @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180502 Assessment and management of pelagic marine ecosystems @ 100% |
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