Caring for nature matters: a relational approach for understanding nature’s contributions to human well-being

Jax, Kurt; Calestani, Melania; Chan, Kai M. A.; Eser, Uta; Keune, Hans; Muraca, Barbara; O’Brien, Liz; Potthast, Thomas; Voget-Kleschin, Lieske; Wittmer, Heidi

doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2018.10.009

Cited by 147 publications

(125 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…A ‘whole person’ approach emphasizes social and emotional capacities along with technical skills more obviously related to labour productivity (Podger, Mustakova‐Possardt, & Reid, 2010; Seligman & Adler, 2018). For instance, environmental education can enhance connectedness, care and kinship (Britto dos Santos & Gould, 2018)—relational values that have multiple benefits for people and nature (Chawla, 2009; Jax et al., 2018; Mayseless, 2015; West et al., 2018; Zylstra, Knight, Esler, & Le Grange, 2014). Similarly, transmission of Indigenous and local knowledge can serve all the roles above, including maintaining invaluable knowledge and experiences about ecological processes, but it is also a keystone to cultural integrity and the maintenance of collective identity (Turner, 2005, 2014).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

et al. 2020

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Humanity is on a deeply unsustainable trajectory. We are exceeding planetary boundaries and unlikely to meet many international sustainable development goals and global environmental targets. Until recently, there was no broadly accepted framework of interventions that could ignite the transformations needed to achieve these desired targets and goals. As a component of the IPBES Global Assessment, we conducted an iterative expert deliberation process with an extensive review of scenarios and pathways to sustainability, including the broader literature on indirect drivers, social change and sustainability transformation. We asked, what are the most important elements of pathways to sustainability? Applying a social–ecological systems lens, we identified eight priority points for intervention (leverage points) and five overarching strategic actions and priority interventions (levers), which appear to be key to societal transformation. The eight leverage points are: (1) Visions of a good life, (2) Total consumption and waste, (3) Latent values of responsibility, (4) Inequalities, (5) Justice and inclusion in conservation, (6) Externalities from trade and other telecouplings, (7) Responsible technology, innovation and investment, and (8) Education and knowledge generation and sharing. The five intertwined levers can be applied across the eight leverage points and more broadly. These include: (A) Incentives and capacity building, (B) Coordination across sectors and jurisdictions, (C) Pre‐emptive action, (D) Adaptive decision‐making and (E) Environmental law and implementation. The levers and leverage points are all non‐substitutable, and each enables others, likely leading to synergistic benefits. Transformative change towards sustainable pathways requires more than a simple scaling‐up of sustainability initiatives—it entails addressing these levers and leverage points to change the fabric of legal, political, economic and other social systems. These levers and leverage points build upon those approved within the Global Assessment's Summary for Policymakers, with the aim of enabling leaders in government, business, civil society and academia to spark transformative changes towards a more just and sustainable world. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

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“…Netherwood et al 2006;Williams 2013;Lange 2018;O'Neil 2018;Mcphie and Clarke 2019;Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2019); environmental values (e.g. Jax et al 2018;Pascual et al 2018;Saxena et al 2018); posthuman sustainability (e.g. Cielemęcka and Daigle 2019;Fox and Alldred 2019;Smith 2019); and quantum theory in sustainability (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education

Walsh

Böhme

Wamsler

2020

Ambio

121

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Relational thinking has recently gained increasing prominence across academic disciplines in an attempt to understand complex phenomena in terms of constitutive processes and relations. Interdisciplinary fields of study, such as science and technology studies (STS), the environmental humanities, and the posthumanities, for example, have started to reformulate academic understanding of nature-cultures based on relational thinking. Although the sustainability crisis serves as a contemporary backdrop and in fact calls for such innovative forms of interdisciplinary scholarship, the field of sustainability research has not yet tapped into the rich possibilities offered by relational thinking. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to identify relational approaches to ontology, epistemology, and ethics which are relevant to sustainability research. More specifically, we analyze how relational approaches have been understood and conceptualized across a broad range of disciplines and contexts relevant to sustainability to identify and harness connections and contributions for future sustainability-related work. Our results highlight common themes and patterns across relational approaches, helping to identify and characterize a relational paradigm within sustainability research. On this basis, we conclude with a call to action for sustainability researchers to codevelop a research agenda for advancing this relational paradigm within sustainability research, practice, and education.

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“…This includes adapting to how the NCP as a conceptual framework, just like ES, is one-directional and not able to reflect intrinsic value, if intrinsic value is conceived of as independent of humans (Kenter 2018). For example, the act of caring for nature, or an ethics of care (Jax et al 2019), here becomes interpreted as either intrinsic value being something unrelated to human-nature values relationships, or as a matter of 'contribution' to wellbeing. RV thereby deliberately manifests the separation of intrinsic value from the scope of NCP or ES, and as Piccolo (2017) points out, posits people's subjective relations as the locus of interest, and as separate from nature.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three perspectives on relational values of nature

Stålhammar

Thorén

2019

Sustain Sci

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Relational value (RV) has recently been introduced as a third class of values for understanding values of nature and are thought to sit alongside more familiar axiological categories such as instrumental and intrinsic value. The concept has quickly gained ground in and promises to better capture how people and collectives perceive of their wellbeing and make choices that involve the natural world. While the idea of relational value is not without merits, its initial and current conceptualization raises questions about how it relates to existing value concepts. Here, we start from an interdisciplinary perspective and delineate how the concept can contribute to addressing problems in three fields that deal with environmental values in different ways: environmental ethics; ecosystem services valuation; and environmental psychology. We provide an overview of value concepts in each field and show how relational value has been described or applied. Our analysis shows that value concepts are used to solve different problems in the three fields, and these differences have implications for how relational value can be framed and situated in values theory. These differences involve e.g., the descriptive question of how people value nature versus the normative questions of why nature should be valued. We show how the concept can be seen as solving the problem of narrow conceptualizations of intrinsic and instrumental value in ecosystem services valuation and suggest that RV can be conceived of as an epistemological framing rather than a values concept. The concept also has potential to function as a 'boundary object' to provide cross-fertilization of disciplinary perspectives.

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Caring for nature matters: a relational approach for understanding nature’s contributions to human well-being

Cited by 147 publications

References 46 publications

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

Towards a relational paradigm in sustainability research, practice, and education

Three perspectives on relational values of nature

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