Patricia Santillán‑Carvantes, Alejandra Tauro, Patricia Balvanera, Juan Miguel Requena‑Mullor, Antonio J. Castro, Cristina Quintas‑Soriano, Berta Martín‑López.

Recognizing and understanding the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of individuals is essential for designing efective policies that promote human development and the sustainable management of social-ecological systems (SES). This is particularly important for smallholders, critical stewards of biodiversity who face acute livelihood challenges. This article explores how smallholders inhabiting tropical dry forests in Mexico perceive their SWB and how it changes across a spectrum of SES that undergo diferent land transformations, management intensities, and governance dynamics. Our aims are to identify the dimensions of SWB that smallholders perceive, understand how these dimensions change across SES, and examine how smallholders’ perceptions of fulflled material and non-material dimensions vary across SES. We analyzed the content of 25 in-depth interviews with farmers and identifed 48 SWB items belonging to six categories: (1) social capital, (2) economic capital, (3) agency, (4) nature, (5) pleasant non-work activities, and (6) governmental services, and two additional dimen[1]sions referred to obstacles and enablers. We found two prevailing visions of SWB: ‘living well’ prevails especially in areas with communal governance and medium management intensity, and ‘need to earn more’ prevails in areas with individual governance and intensifed land management. As management is intensifed and governance fosters individualism, the lower the self-perceived material and non-material satisfaction. We discuss the diferent SWB found per SES, as well as strategies that can foster smallholder’s SWB and SES dynamics that can motivate diferent conservation goals and sustainable uses of nature, especially in biodiverse areas