Green Care practices have received increasing scholarly attention in the last decade. Yet most studies are concerned with the aspect of human well-being, with less attention given to other caring dimensions and their relation to sustainability. This paper aims to contribute to an integrative understanding of Green Care by proposing an analytical framework inspired by the ethics of care literature and, in particular, Tronto’s five stages of caring (about, for, with, giving, and receiving). The goal is to use a relational lens to appreciate the diverse caring practices and their potential in three Finnish cases studies—a care farm, a biodynamic farm, and a nature-tourism company. We apply the framework on data gathered during three years through an in-depth participatory action-oriented research. Findings show that: (a) Green Care practitioners share sustainability concerns that go beyond human well-being and that translate into practices with benefits for the target users, wider community, and ecosystems; (b) caring is a relational achievement attained through iterative processes of learning. Two concluding insights can be inferred: a care lens sheds light on practitioners’ moral agency and its sustainability potential; in-depth creative methods are needed for a thorough and grounded investigation of human and non-human caring relations in Green Care practices.
This paper aims at investigating the change over time in the environmental awareness in rural Chinese communities and its correlation with environmental management measures implemented at the local level. We identify three main components of awareness, namely: perception, behavior, and attitude toward environmental management measures. Data were collected from two surveys in three villages in northern China in 2006 and 2015 that interviewed 125 and 129 respondents, respectively, and were analyzed employing an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. The results discussed in the paper show that environmental awareness increased between 2006-2015, and was mainly manifested in better environmental behavior and understanding of environmental status due an improvement in rural infrastructure and a greater amount of information provided to rural residents about the environment. Place of residence had a considerable influence on respondents' environmental awareness: residents in eco-villages had a higher environmental awareness than those living in common agricultural villages. This appears to indicate a positive nexus between the comprehensiveness of environmental management measures implemented locally, and environmental awareness. Also, the universality of environment issues reduced the importance of socioeconomic and demographic factors in determining the degree of environmental awareness. However, more attention should be paid to villagers' external behavior and inner feelings, such as their attitude to governmental management policies. These findings yield important policy implications that are relevant to the promotion of environmental awareness in China's rural communities, and the adoption of more effective environmental management measures.
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