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Working paper A group of 20 international colleagues reflect on how to invite care into productive, creative spaces without being physically together.

In this perspective article we start from the theories of constructivism and conceptual change within the field of education to develop and present hypotheses about how understandings of biodiversity and diversity more generally are formed. We argue that extrinsic and circumstantial elements from everyday experiences are relevant in shaping understandings of biodiversity.We discuss how children’s games and food-related experiences may influence how children form conceptions of biodiversity. We focus on ‘misconceptions,’ areas where conceptions differ from established ideas in ecology. These include: underestimating the importance of diversity for “complementarity” and over-simplifications of how nature works. Firstly, we examine a type of children’s game that often concerns biodiversity and consists of a puzzle where the forming of categories is encouraged. Secondly, we discuss people’s relation to nature through food in their diets. We believe that targeted intervention is needed to move towards an inclusive and multi-faceted representation of biodiversity, one that emphasises fundamental properties that make a whole and interacting parts. We argue that experiences of games and food can be pivotal in developing a deeper understanding of these fundamental properties of biodiversity. These would be important experiences to consider when attempting transformative change of relationships between people and nature.

Agricultural land management has major implications for biodiversity and ecosystem services, including the many cultural and social values that agricultural landscapes provide. A key challenge is balancing trade-offs between these diverse and sometimes conflicting goals. One popular but controversial tool to address this challenge is Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, which offer agricultural producers monetary compensation for stewardship actions. In this dissertation, I consider the role of environmental values in policy-making and program development, both for PES or alternative policy options to address the ecological impacts of agriculture. The first study examines the consequences of applying a metric (as a simple scientific tool) towards the challenge of food system sustainability in Vancouver, Canada. Via a case study examining four different policy options (including a PES program), I conclude that the Ecological Footprint, when applied as a sustainability metric, led the city towards a ‘metric trap’ that excluded policy options and prioritized particular values. The second study examines an incentive program in Costa Rica that pays farmers to protect forested land. I show that while program management focused on the instrumental values of nature and used an economic framing for the program, most participants focused on values about their relationships to the land (relational values) and saw the program as a type of help or support. The final two studies examine an incentive program for riparian buffers on agricultural land in the Puget Sound region of Washington State (USA). In the third study, I use interviews with land managers to show how key program rules conflict with farmer and rural land manager values. The fourth study draws on expert interviews and document analysis to show the ways that supposedly value-free scientific guidelines, in reality, express a suite of values regarding culture, landscape and place. This dissertation as a whole shows the ways that environmental policies and programs articulate values about what matters, and why, via supposedly value-free rules, regulations, metrics, and guidelines. I conclude by offering suggestions for how agri-environmental incentive programs could be made more effective and popular by incorporating values-thinking.

A cornerstone of environmental policy is the debate over protecting nature for humans’ sake (instrumental values) or for nature’s (intrinsic values) (1). We propose that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and collective well-being, or “what is right,” with regard to nature and the environment. Without complementary attention to other ways that value is expressed and realized by people, such a focus may inadvertently promote worldviews at odds with fair and desirable futures. It is time to engage seriously with a third class of values, one with diverse roots and current expressions: relational values. By doing so, we reframe the discussion about environmental protection, and open the door to new, potentially more productive policy approaches.

A cornerstone of environmental policy is the debate over protecting nature for humans’ sake (instrumental values) or for nature’s (intrinsic values) (1). We propose that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and collective well-being, or “what is right,” with regard to nature and the environment. Without complementary attention to other ways that value is expressed and realized by people, such a focus may inadvertently promote worldviews at odds with fair and desirable futures. It is time to engage seriously with a third class of values, one with diverse roots and current expressions: relational values. By doing so, we reframe the discussion about environmental protection, and open the door to new, potentially more productive policy approaches.

There are limited approaches available that enable researchers and practitioners to conduct multiple case study comparisons of complex cases of collaboration in natural resource management and conservation. The absence of such tools is felt despite the fact that over the past several years a great deal of literature has reviewed the state of the science regarding collaboration. Much of this work is based on case studies of collaboration and highlights the importance of contextual variables, further complicating efforts to compare outcomes across case-study areas and the likely failure of approaches based on one size fits all generalizations. We expand on the standard overview of the field by identifying some of the challenges associated with managing complex systems with multiple resources, multiple stakeholder groups with diverse knowledges/understandings, and multiple objectives across multiple scales, i.e., multifaceted collaborative initiatives. We then elucidate how a realist methodology, within a critical realist framing, can support efforts to compare multiple case studies of such multifaceted initiatives. The methodology we propose considers the importance and impact of context for the origins, purpose, and success of multifaceted collaborative natural resource management and conservation initiatives in social-ecological systems.

There is increasing recognition in academic circles of the importance of adaptive governance for the sustainability of social-ecological systems, but little examination of specific implications for the 34% of land-use where human activities are pervasive but potentially commensurate with functioning ecosystems: agricultural production systems. In this paper, we argue for the need to view food systems and agro-ecosystems as multi-scalar complex adaptive systems and identify five key challenging characteristics of such systems: multi-causality; cumulative impacts; regime shifts; teleconnections and mismatch of scales. These characteristics are necessary features of multi-scalar adaptive systems, and apply equally to social and natural subsystems. We discuss the implications of these characteristics for agricultural production systems and consider how governance can rise to these challenges. We present five case studies that highlight these issues: pollinator declines; payments for ecosystem services; pest control and pesticide resistance; downstream aquatic systems in Tasman Bay, New Zealand; and riparian buffers in Puget Sound, USA. From these case studies we derive recommendations for managing agricultural systems, both specific and general. Ultimately, adaptive governance of agro-ecosystems will likely hinge upon three paradigm shifts: viewing farmers and ranchers not only as food producers but also as land and water managers; seeking not yield maximization but rather resilient management of food ecosystems; and critically, as it transcends the production-system literature, engaging broad audiences not only as consumers but also citizens.

For cities seeking sustainability, the Ecological Footprint seems to be an excellent metric, potentially catalyzing actions directed outwards, at environmental problems beyond city limits. But does this metric actually guide cities down sustainable pathways? Through a case study of the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan we ask what barriers and side effects accompany a city’s application of a specific metric to measure achievement towards sustainability goals. Our case study began by examining a particular approach to achieving EF reduction (proposed by the City: local beef). Through a triple loop learning approach we broadened our analysis to include additional policy options not originally on the table. For each of four policy options (1. local beef, 2. grass-fed beef, 3. payments for ecosystem services, and 4. using a proxy metric focused on individual and community leadership) we evaluate their ability to meet the Ecological Footprint metric, consider their potential to address the broader goal and discuss their feasibility as policy options for the city. Our analysis showed the ways the Ecological Footprint metric: a. focused attention on non-actionable policy areas, b. was nonresponsive to promising policy options and c. limited the types of policy options considered. In this case we demonstrate how the choice of the Ecological Footprint as a metric and goal had unintended consequences and instead shifted attention and policy inwards. By avoiding this ‘metric trap,’ cities might contribute importantly to regional and global sustainability.

Financial incentives are increasingly popular in development and conservation. A common application involves paying for conservation activities, such as for farmers to set aside land for forests, known as payments for ecosystem services (PES). Debates about incentives such as PES center around the promise and perils of applying market logics to conservation or development goals. A key concern is the potential of financial motivations to crowd out non-financial motivations such as altruism or responsibility. Theoretical debates about the potential impacts of PES programs often assume that PES programs are understood as such by participants—as transactions characterized by a payment for a service—but research has not sufficiently investigated the extent to which these assumptions hold in practice. We studied Costa Rica’s long-standing PES program in the traditional cattle ranching region of Guanacaste via in-depth interviews with program managers, local experts and participants to better understand the range of values and views associated with program payments. We find that whereas program leadership primarily communicated the program as clearly-defined payments for specific services provided, most farmer participants framed financial payments from the program as a form of non-transactional support recognizing their ongoing care for the land and forest. This finding—that market framings did not fully transfer from program leadership through local managers to farmer participants—shows how participants might experience PES programs not as payments for services per se, but as acknowledgement for land stewardship and an additional form of rural development assistance. The support for stewards framing of PES, as suggested by participants themselves, points to a potential leverage point in designing PES programs that enhance (rather than undermine) connections to nature. More broadly, incentive programs of all sorts might consider program framings that reinforce the kinds of values (e.g., social cohesion, health) they seek to improve.

Conservation policy relies on input from science, yet scientists are often frustrated by the ‘gap’ between their recommendations and policy decisions. In this paper we examine one such ‘gap’: how a long-standing conflict of values functioned to ‘infect’ the synthesis and application of riparian science for salmon habitat restoration projects. We do this by analysis of a policy debate over the required minimum width of riparian buffers in voluntary conservation programs on agricultural lands in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. Based on an analysis of expert interviews and document analysis, we first outline the key features of the values debate. We then show the ways values ‘infected’ the debate over the science of riparian restoration. We identify a set of four ‘stumbling blocks’ in the science to policy gap that together led to both an intractable debate and an oversimplification of the science: conflation of science and policy, application of science out of context, limited consideration of alternatives, and obscuring debate via technical and bureaucratic language. We conclude with a set of ‘waypoints’ that can help ecologists, conservation managers and policy makers to better navigate the journey from science to policy.

For cities seeking sustainability, the Ecological Footprint seems to be an excellent metric, potentially catalyzing actions directed outwards, at environmental problems beyond city limits. But does this metric actually guide cities down sustainable pathways? Through a case study of the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan, we ask what barriers and side effects accompany a city’s application of a specific metric to measure achievement towards sustainability goals. Our case study began by examining a particular approach to achieving EF reduction (proposed by the City: local beef). Through a triple-loop learning approach, we broadened our analysis to include additional policy options not originally on the table. For each of four policy options (1. local beef, 2. grass-fed beef, 3. payments for ecosystem services, and 4. using a proxy metric focused on individual and community leadership), we evaluate their ability to meet the Ecological Footprint metric, consider their potential to address the broader goal and discuss their feasibility as policy options for the city. Our analysis showed the ways the Ecological Footprint metric: (a) focused attention on non-actionable policy areas, (b) was non-responsive to promising policy options and (c) limited the types of policy options considered. In this case we demonstrate how the choice of the Ecological Footprint as a metric and goal had unintended consequences and instead shifted attention and policy inwards. By avoiding this ‘metric trap’, cities might contribute importantly to regional and global sustainability.

There is increasing recognition in academic circles of the importance of adaptive governance for the sustainability of social-ecological systems, but little examination of specific implications for the 34% of land-use where human activities are pervasive but potentially commensurate with functioning ecosystems: agricultural production systems. In this paper, we argue for the need to view food systems and agro-ecosystems as multi-scalar complex adaptive systems and identify five key challenging characteristics of such systems: multi-causality; cumulative impacts; regime shifts; teleconnections and mismatch of scales. These characteristics are necessary features of multi-scalar adaptive systems, and apply equally to social and natural subsystems. We discuss the implications of these characteristics for agricultural production systems and consider how governance can rise to these challenges. We present five case studies that highlight these issues: pollinator declines; payments for ecosystem services; pest control and pesticide resistance; downstream aquatic systems in Tasman Bay, New Zealand; and riparian buffers in Puget Sound, USA. From these case studies we derive recommendations for managing agricultural systems, both specific and general. Ultimately, adaptive governance of agro-ecosystems will likely hinge upon three paradigm shifts: viewing farmers and ranchers not only as food producers but also as land and water managers; seeking not yield maximization but rather resilient management of food ecosystems; and critically, as it transcends the production-system literature, engaging broad audiences not only as consumers but also citizens.