| 1. |
- Boda, Chad, et al.
(författare)
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A collective alternative to the Inward Turn in environmental sustainability research
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6491 .- 2190-6483. ; 12:2, s. 291-297
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It has become quite common in environmental sustainability research to promote the influencing of so-called inner dimensions of individuals as means to address pressing environmental problems such as climate change, what we refer to as the Inward Turn. We argue that the conceptual foundations of the Inward Turn, an extreme form of methodological individualism, limit it significantly as a strategy for addressing climate change and other socially relevant environmental problems. After briefly reviewing major shortcomings with the way the Inward Turn conceptualizes the relationship between individuals and social change, including its neglect of causal structures and propensity to abstract its analysis away from problems that are specific to place and time, we sketch the basic tenets of an alternative methodological approach capable of overcoming these limitations. Our approach, however, does not go to the other extreme and neglect the role of individuals; rather, our recognition of the structural drivers of particular environmental problems points to the necessity of specific collective actions by individuals, for example, in the practice of social movements. This recognition demands a rethinking of the role of individual factors, like emotion and empathy, in addressing environmental sustainability problems, namely as they relate to collective action/social movement emergence, development, and outcomes.
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| 2. |
- Boda, Chad, et al.
(författare)
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Three crucial considerations when presenting alternative paradigms in sustainability research
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6491 .- 2190-6483.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sustainability science (SS) is diverse field of problem-driven and solution-oriented research that is still developing. The further maturation of the field relies on its practitioners formulating alternative paradigms to use-inspired knowledge production to facilitate comparison and reasoned judgment on what constitutes scientific best practices. In this short article, we flag several blind spots that can arise in attempts to articulate potential paradigms in SS. We identify and discuss three crucial components that should be included when constructing and presenting potential paradigms in the field, namely the necessity of 1) comparing suggested alternatives with available competitors, 2) preserving scientific integrity in scientific knowledge production, and 3) clarifying the particular contribution of scientific knowledge to social change. Keeping sight of these three important issues will allow the still developing field of SS to mature in a way that builds on scientific comparison and reasoned judgment among the field’s practitioners, with implications for advancing its research agenda. The issues we outline here should not only concern authors, but reviewers and editors of SS journals as well.
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| 3. |
- Ezebilo, Eugene Ejike
(författare)
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Maintenance of public amenity to improve access to nature area: does distance and expected economic benefits matter?
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; 4, s. 240-249
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Advocates of national park are often of the opinion that benefits from ecotourism will compensate people whose livelihoods are affected by conservation policy. This paper reports on a study which explored whether local people consider distance of their homes to a national park and future economic benefits from ecotourism when eliciting their willingness to pay for rural road that could help improve access to the park for ecotourism. The possibilities for designing an ecotourism strategy that benefits people who live around the national park are discussed. The data originated from a contingent valuation survey which involves personal interviews of community members around the Okwangwo Division of the Cross River National Park in south-east Nigeria and were analysed using a two-stage least squares regression model. The results showed that the respondents consider location of the national park and whether they will benefit from businesses related to ecotourism when stating their willingness to pay. The interviewees who live 7.1 to 10km to the Okwangwo Division had the highest willingness to pay, and those who live not more than 1km had the lowest. The interviewees who expect to get economic benefits from ecotourism in the future had higher willingness to pay than those who did not expect. The willingness to pay was influenced by distance, expected economic benefits, income, age and gender. The findings will contribute to planning and design of a more acceptable and sustainable ecotourism strategy near nature conservation areas.
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| 4. |
- Gianquitto, Tina, et al.
(författare)
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A case study in citizen environmental humanities : creating a participatory plant story website
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; 12, s. 327-340
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Public engagement in crowd-sourced science projects such as iNaturalist or the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is a longestablished practice within environmental studies and sciences. As a corollary to these "citizen science" efforts, "citizen humanities" engages public participation in humanities research and/or with humanities tools such as creative writing, photography, art-making, or conducting and recording interviews. In this essay, we outline our work creating a citizen environmental humanities website, Herbaria 3.0, including our motivations, process, and theoretical underpinnings. This project draws upon the critical understanding within environmental studies of the importance of narrative and storytelling for fostering a connection and commitment to environments and nonhuman beings. Situated within the field of environmental humanities, our website solicits, collects, and archives stories about the manifold relationships between plants and people, inviting visitors to read, share, or write their own story for digital publication. The kind of environmental storytelling that results, we argue, can (1) enrich our conceptualization of attachment to places, (2) expand our notion of what "counts" as an encounter with nature, and (3) help us recognize the agency of individual plants. We conclude that similar citizen humanities projects are crucial to the ongoing work of environmental humanities and environmental studies at large, for it is through such public engagement that we can meet the cultural challenges that seeded, and the societal problems occasioned by, ongoing climate change.
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| 5. |
- Goodsite, Michael Evan, et al.
(författare)
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The role of science diplomacy: a historical development and international legal framework of arctic research stations under conditions of climate change, post-cold war geopolitics and globalization/power transition
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Publishing Company. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; , s. 1-17
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Arctic is undergoing transformation, where three important drivers are climate change, post-Cold War geopolitics and globalization/power transition from the rise of China. This transformation defines the nexus between science diplomacy, geopolitics, law and globalization under climate change, which is shaping the future of the Arctic and will bring considerable opportunity at national, regional and global levels. Research infrastructures (research stations both military and non-military, observation and monitoring networks) are opening access and data to new Arctic and non-Arctic players. Additional logistics hubs than those already existing are and should be established. Countries are sustaining and building new research as well as search and rescue bases/stations. Stations can be used as indicator of this transformation as well as their implications to improve cooperation, engage in multilateral rather than unilateral actions to protect the Arctic infrastructures and to improve military capabilities. These actions have started to attract also non-Arctic actors, such as China and the European Union (EU), which are developing new policies. Stations may not be developed and maintained only not only for the purpose of the scientific understanding of climatic and environmental impacts but also for function as entities that legitimize national or sovereign claims. At the nexus are the scientists that utilize the research bases and their international colleagues. Arctic/Northern bases are primarily military for historical reasons and for reasons of logistics and expertise, as historically indicated through the American presence in Alaska. This is not the same as saying that the bases are militarized—or part of some national militarization strategy in the Arctic. New steps to identify the role of stations at national, regional and global levels are needed. In this essay, we explore the implications and opportunities for these stations to act as pivots between scientific and geopolitical issues. We argue that where there is scientific collaboration, there is less risk of military conflict and that the Arctic is not “militarized” based on the international politics and science diplomacy of the Arctic.
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| 6. |
- Lundgren, Jakob, 1992
(författare)
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The Grand Concepts of Environmental Studies Boundary objects between disciplines and policymakers
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; 11, s. 93-100
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration is necessary in order to take on the environmental challenges facing humanity. Different disciplines, stakeholders, and policymakers need to work together to produce the knowledge necessary to create effective and just courses of action to counteract environmental problems. Recently, the notion of ‘boundary objects’ has been increasingly used within environmental studies to explain how some objects facilitate communication across the boundaries between different groups of actors. Due to their vague use in common contexts and specific use in each group, these objects let groups retain their own understanding while still communicating successfully with others. Novel concepts like ‘resilience’, ‘ecosystem services’, and ‘sustainability’ are due to their interpretive flexibility commonly described as boundary objects. However, in order to implement these concepts in concrete policy, some amount of standardization is needed. This presents a tension with the vagueness required for the facilitation of communication. This paper explicates whether and how novel concepts in environmental studies can be usefully understood as boundary objects. I review how boundary objects have been applied in the literature surrounding inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, focusing especially on instances where concepts were considered to be boundary objects. I suggest that novel concepts in environmental studies can be understood as both ‘grand concepts’ in their most widespread use and as ‘hubs and spokes’ in local contexts. This allows for both vagueness at the macro level and standardization at the local level. I also explore how models, frameworks, and data have been successfully used as boundary objects. © 2020, The Author(s).
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| 7. |
- O'byrne, David
(författare)
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Restoring human freedoms: from utilitarianism to a capability approach to wetland restoration in Louisiana’s coastal master plan
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6491 .- 2190-6483. ; 12:2, s. 298-310
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
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| 8. |
- Priebe, Janina, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Narrow pasts and futures: how frames of sustainability transformation limit societal change
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; 11:1, s. 76-84
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Two frames dominate present-day interpretations of sustainability and approaches to sustainability transformation in national and global policy arenas. One frame relates to transformation in global environmental governance that promotes goal-oriented agendas. The other frame relates to earth system sciences where sustainability transformation means breaking the devastating trends of the Anthropocene. In this paper, we examine the historical and cultural underpinnings of these two frames, each invoking particular relations and approaches to sustainability transformation. Our contribution is to discuss the role of the past in these frames and to illuminate how current outlooks toward the future still rely on principles that emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and thus hinder alternative approaches to transformation in the present.
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| 9. |
- Schröter, Barbara, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring the role of boundary work in a social-ecological synthesis initiative
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; 13:2, s. 330-343
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration in environmental studies faces the challenge of communicating across disciplines to reach a common understanding of scientific problems and solutions in a changing world. One way to address current pressing environmental challenges is to employ a boundary work approach that uses activities across borders of separated field of research. But how can this look like in practice? In this research brief, we self-evaluated the boundary work approach in a synthesis group on socio-ecological systems, based on an online survey with participants. Here, we discuss how boundary work can be used to integrate the knowledge from natural and social scientists both working on social-ecological systems. We found participants were selected to be acted as boundary spanners and were willing to cooperate for solving multidisciplinary issues regarding the understanding, management, and maintenance of ecosystem services. A social-ecological network analysis framework served as a boundary concept and object for communication and knowledge integration. Being familiar with a joint boundary concept like ecosystem services prior to the working group event supported the communication of participants. These results indicate that synthesis initiatives could strategically leverage boundary work through the careful selection of members, with the inclusion of boundary spanners, as well as prior joint identification of boundary concepts and objects.
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| 10. |
- Sundberg, Cecilia
(författare)
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Are households willing to pay for full-cost solid waste collection? Evidence from Kumasi Metropolis of Ghana
- 2011
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2190-6483 .- 2190-6491. ; 1, s. 144-153
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Solid waste generation and its collection have become a major concern of town planning authorities in recent years as a result of increased population and consumption levels. As part of efforts to improve solid waste collection delivery in the city of Kumasi, full payments by residents have been considered to curb the increasing quantum of money being spent on collection delivery. Are households willing to pay for this service? The authors employed double-bound contingent valuation method to determine the households' willingness to pay for the full cost of solid waste collection in the Kumasi metropolis of Ghana which generates an approximately 1,000 tons of solid waste per day. The paper established that, presently, households would be unwilling to pay for the full-cost solid waste collection service. The paper further found out that the key socio-economic factors that could influence the payment of this service by the households were the age, gender, employment, income (price bid), and education.
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