Bouncing back: recovery from the impacts of COVID-19 on human wellbeing in Kenyan coastal fishing communities

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.