Restoring human freedoms: from utilitarianism to a capability approach to wetland restoration in Louisiana’s coastal master plan

Coastal restoration is being undertaken globally to address and avoid the losses caused by rising relative sea levels and other forms of coastal ecosystem degradation. Restoration decision-making is increasingly considering its social impacts, but how social factors should be incorporated in decision-making is a matter of debate. Multi-criteria approaches are promoted for their ability to overcome problems associated with monetary valuation of nature. Louisiana’s coastal restoration program has been promoted as a good example of a multi-criteria approach. This article engages in a critical examination of the wetland restoration program contained in Louisiana’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan (CMP). The principles that underlie decision-making, and how these principles are deployed through decision tools and metrics, constitute an implicit utilitarianism. This utilitarianism, in spite of the use of multiple criteria, recreates problems commonly associated with monetary valuation, namely, it creates poor distributional outcomes and fails to account for non-economic values of nature. The study argues that these problems can be overcome with a systematic use of the capability approach. This would involve the development of an evaluative framework that prioritizes the freedoms of the worst-off, and translation of this framework into a series of metrics compatible with planning models and tools. The paper closes by outlining some challenges to achieving a capability approach in Louisiana’s CMP.