Search

Listening is a pervasive and significant act of conservation research and praxis, mattering greatly for the realisation of conservation agendas, not least its ambitions to be outward looking and inclusive in approach. Yet, the value and role of listening has been barely explored in a sustained and reflexive way. This paper is a preliminary schematic of what it might mean to attend to the act of listening, set within the context of a larger field of listening scholarship as well as more specific manoeuvres to embed relational approaches into the study of people and nature interactions. We explore what it means to 'listen well' within the context of conservation, highlighting the importance of recognising listening as a relationship and our positions and power within those relationships; the need to care for the relationship through respect and empathy; and the building of inclusive relationships of listening by attending to how space and time influences understanding. We offer examples of how researchers and practitioners can create spaces for listening, illustrating our discussion with personal reflections about listening practices gained through our various conservation and research careers. We provide approaches and ideas which help the reader—academic and practitioner—to both understand and articulate the value of listening in conservation and relational values of nature. We hope to inspire the wider use of listening-based approaches in conservation research and practice, and the recognition and support from senior managers and funders of what is needed to promote long-term and meaningful relationships between people and nature.

The development of domestic network services (gas, electricity, water, telephone etc.) has gone hand in hand with methods of metering and payment that prioritized consumer convenience over control;...

The involvement of technical experts in environmental management and their perspectives on environmental justice issues can influence how justice notions become integrated into sub-national policies and programs. In other words, the justice-related norms perceived by technical experts have a huge impact on the delivery of justice for society and local environmental practices. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as the world’s most widespread environmental policy tool, provides an opportunity for exploring the incorporation of justice in everyday environmental practices. Specifically, how justice concerns related to global sustainability goals might be promoted or shutdown at the sub-national level through the actions of the technical experts involved i.e., those referred to here as ‘intermediary actors.’ This article reports on research which used semi-structured interviews to investigate the justice-related norms prioritized and promoted by intermediary actors, namely consultants, academics, and governmental officers, in the technical review process of EIA in Indonesia. It also examined the facilitating or constraining factors for negotiating and mobilizing those norms in the project debates of EIA at the sub-national level. We find that the intermediaries engaged with prioritized issues of justice unevenly, as they prioritized distributive and procedural justice over recognitional concerns. Our findings also uncovered crucial structural factors that have preserved existing unequal power relationships in a decentralized environmental governance system. Traditional and authoritative customs underlying environmental policies and practices therefore have significantly influenced the prioritization of justice-related norms. These social and cultural contexts have also restricted an upward mobilization of justice concerns from the sub-national to national and international governance levels. This study argues that the intermediaries need various institutional, physical, and social resources to advance global sustainability and justice agendas at the sub-national level via existing national environmental management tools.

“Energy literacy” is of great interest to those researching sustainable consumption, particularly with regard to its relationship to domestic energy use. This paper reflects on the pedagogic aspects of fieldwork recently carried out by undergraduate geography students in their own homes to assess energy-related technologies and practices, and how these come together into a singular, aggregated number produced by the energy meter. Conceptualising energy literacy as comprising cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains, we evaluate the experiences reported by the students, and discuss next steps in expanding the exercise and learning.

SUMMARYMembers of the public and resource-dependent communities are increasingly participating alongside professional scientists to monitor the natural world. This study applies the contention from development studies that participatory approaches may be tyrannical to participatory monitoring of Nepal's community forests. There is a tyranny of the group because elites within the community stand to benefit at the cost of those already marginalized. In theory, tyranny is produced through the methods employed in the projects, as they promote scientific systems of monitoring at the expense of local understandings of environmental change; in practice, however, the latter aspects override official monitoring to enable effective learning from the projects. In some instances, tyranny is produced through decision-making and control, whilst, in other cases, the reverse is true and communities are empowered through their participatory monitoring efforts. Policy makers and those involved in participatory monitoring should endeavour to transform tyranny created at local and wider scales. Participatory monitoring holds huge potential in the assessment of biodiversity, natural resources and ecosystem services, but programmes and projects need to effectively deliver associated benefits of conservation and community empowerment.

Participatory ecological monitoring brings together conservationists and members of the public to collect data about changes in nature. This article scrutinizes the “social nature” of such monitoring, considering not only its impacts for nature, but also society, and importantly the ways in which these interact. Drawing on the field of nature–society studies we present a framework with which to explore case studies from the community forests of Nepal. We document the importance of multiple knowledges of nature, including what is referred to as “local monitoring” and its relation to the scientific procedures promoted in participatory monitoring; the consequences of participatory monitoring as a situated and embodied practice, such that it may (re)produce social inequalities; and the place of monitoring within the wider socioecological regime, with regard to possible unintended consequences for both nature and society. This article thus expands our understanding of the complexities of this increasingly popu...