Facing the challenges of environmental and social changes, sustainable management of ecosystem services is a worldwide priority. The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) approach provides a unique opportunity for promoting transdisciplinary place-based comparative research for social-ecological systems (SES) management. As part of the PECS-sponsored WaterSES project, we used four place-based SES research sites to analyze patterns in perceptions of ecosystem services. Our data come from about 1,500 face-to-face surveys conducted in southern Spain, the south-central Great Plains of Oklahoma (USA), and the Portneuf and Treasure Valleys, Idaho (USA). Specifically, this study aimed to (1) describe and compare perceptions of ecosystem services within and across SES sites, (2) explore how perceptions of ecosystem services vary among local respondents and by sociodemographic factors, and (3) evaluate the overall relationship between place-based SES contexts and ecosystem service perceptions. Our results revealed that cultural ecosystem services were the most highly mentioned among those surveyed across all four sites. However, we found differences in how ecosystem services were perceived among the four SES contexts. For instance, both, social (e.g., gender, education) and local ecological (e.g., land use and climate) characteristics play roles in influencing people's perceptions of which services are important. Overall, our findings suggest the relationship between people's perceptions of ecosystem services and their socialenvironmental context is complex, which highlights the value of the PECS approach for crafting more effective and inclusive landscape management strategies.
Community-Supported Agriculture programs have become a popular model for providing consumers with direct economic engagement with independent local organic farms. The degree to which Community-Supported Agriculture members are unified in their identity and consumer interests, however, is unclear. One possibility is that mostly individual interests including supposed nutritional benefits, superior taste, and avoidance of synthetic pesticides motivate Community-Supported Agriculture members. Another is that they are motivated more by environmental and economic concerns at the collective level. Our study engages this debate by analyzing emergent themes in consumers' motivational narratives using interview data with 58 members of a Community-Supported Agriculture program in a large southwestern city in the United States. We find that Community-Supported Agriculture members are largely unified in their consumer orientation and pursue individualist and collectivist goals equally. In other words, Community-Supported Agriculture members are neither primarily altruistic nor egoistic consumers, but they approach their consumption as a holistic act. Specifically, they emphasize environmental issues and a commitment to sustainability through local organic consumption as a pathway to individual health. This suggests that an internally homogeneous, yet multidimensional, framework constitutes the motivational structure of local organic food consumption. We argue this framework aligns with an emerging eco-habitus exhibited in environmentally conscious market fields that translate into both collective and individual benefits.
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