What are ecosystem services for the inhabitants of a Burkina Faso village ?
The concept of "ecosystem services" was developed to promote conservation and is intended to throw light on how changes in biodiversity over time relate to human appreciations of it. The authors examine to how well the perceptions of the residents of a village, Kotoudéni, in the Kenedougou province of Burkina Faso may be captured by this notion. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 23 inhabitants to determine their social status and elicit comments on the component zones of the local landscape (terroir villager), the relative importance of those zones, their distinctive uses, the religions, “tradition” and the interviewees’ reactions to ongoing environmental and social change. The local farmers’ understanding of "ecosystem services" as revealed in the course of these interviews is here contrasted with the categories of the MEA classification (2005). While the material uses match rather well the MEA categories, the main service provided to the local residents by their ecosystems is the organization of their world and a guarantee of harmony within that world through the action of invisible beings (ancestors and genies). Trying to insert this spiritual service in the category of cultural services is equivalent to disfigure it and deny its significance. This leads to the conclusion that such a standardized categorization cannot grasp cultural services : for them the use of wider anthropological approaches remains necessary.