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Sea lampreys (Petromyzon marinus) invaded the Great Lakes in the early twentieth century and caused considerable economic and ecological harm. People who fished the Great Lakes suffered crippling losses and successfully lobbied elected officials in Canada and the United States to create a sea lamprey control program which the Great Lakes Fishery Commission implements under the 1954 Convention on Great Lakes Fisheries. The control program relies on two primary methods: chemical lampricides and physical barriers. Sea lamprey control has been a tremendous success; although the urgency to act is apparent to certain publics and although control methods are deemed by professionals to be safe and effective, continued public advocacy for and acceptance of the control program is not ensured. Many people in the control program are concerned that the urgency to act is not commensurate with the risk sea lampreys continue to pose and that societal acceptance of the primary control methods could wane. This commentary reflects on issues of “shifting baselines” (changes in perceived risk) and the “social license to operate” (trust in authorities to make responsible decisions regarding current and planned control methods) and suggests a course to better understand these issues. Improved understanding of these issues will inform communication efforts for all involved in the control program. Moreover, the case examined here is potentially relevant and informative for other environmentally related actions where there may be erosion of the social license.

Unimpeded transfer and spread of invasive species throughout freshwater systems is of global concern, altering species compositions, disrupting ecosystem processes, and diverting economic resources. The magnitude and complexity of the problem is amplified by the global connectedness of human movements and the multiple modes of inter-basin transport of aquatic invasive species. Our objective was to trace the fishing behavior of anglers delineating potential pathways of transfer of invasive species throughout the vast inland waters of the Great Lakes of North America, which contain more than 21% of the world’s surface freshwater and are among the most highly invaded aquatic ecosystems in the world. Combining a comprehensive survey and a spatial analysis of the movements of thousands of anglers in 12 states within the US portion of the Great Lakes Basin and the Upper Mississippi and Ohio River Basins, we estimated that 6.5 million licensed anglers in the study area embarked on an average of 30 fishing trips over the course of the year, and 70% of the individuals fished in more than one county. Geospatial linkages showed direct connections made by individuals traveling between 99% of the 894 counties where fishing occurred, and between 61 of the 66 sub-watersheds in a year. Estimated numbers of fishing trips to individual counties ranged from 1199–1.95 million; generally highest in counties bordering the Great Lakes. Of these, 79 had more than 10,000 estimated fishing trips originating from anglers living in other counties. Although angler movements are one mechanism of invasive species transfer, there likely is a high cumulative probability of invasive species transport by several million people fishing each year throughout this extensive freshwater network. A comprehensive georeferenced survey, coupled with a spatial analysis of fishing destinations, provides a potentially powerful tool to track, predict, curtail and control the transfer and proliferation of invasive species in freshwater.

Public support for natural areas and engagement in place-specific pro-environmental behaviors (PS-PEB) has predominantly focused on individuals’ relationships with and attachments to a specific place. However, recent discussions suggest that individuals’ general connection to nature is equally important in determining individuals’ willingness to engage in PS-PEB. Within the context of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, an urban nature preserve in Albany, NY, we surveyed preserve visitors (n = 1,938) to examine the independent predictive power of place attachment and environmental identity (EID) on individuals’ intention to perform PS-PEB. Utilizing a series of multivariate regression models, we found that both place attachment and EID were independent predictors of individuals’ intention to engage in PS-PEB in support of the APBP. We suggest that future research should further examine the relationship between place attachment and EID in the context of both place-specific and general pro-environmental behaviors (PEB).

Framing has long been a central construct in scholarship on the role of rhetoric and discourse in the policy process. Research on policy framing and identity thus far has neglected the role of place‐based identity, focusing instead on identity constructs such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Through a mixed methods analysis of transcripts of City Council meetings in Philadelphia from 2007 to 2017, we analyze how policy makers, local interest groups, and national/regional interest groups employ place‐based framing to define, explain, and propose solutions to environmental problems. We contrast local place‐based frames with more abstract global frames that center arguments for policy change on the national or global implications of environmental problems. Our results reveal that place‐based framing is a dominant mode of discourse in Philadelphia environmental policy discussions and that actors may employ frames strategically so as to appeal to place‐based identities and to further political goals. 就言辞和话语在政策过程中的作用而言，相关研究长期将框架作为一个关键建构。目前为止，关于政策框架和认同的研究忽视了基于地点的认同（place‐based identity）所发挥的作用，而聚焦于例如种族、阶层、性别和族群性等认同建构。通过对2007‐2017年费城市议会的会议记录进行混合方法分析，我们分析了决策者、地方利益团体、和国家/地区利益团体如何通过基于地点的框架来定义、解释和提出环境问题解决方案。我们对比了基于地点的地方框架和更抽象的全球框架，后者主张对环境问题造成的国家或全球影响进行政策变革。我们的结果显示，基于地点的框架是费城环境政策探讨中的主导话语模式，并且行动者能战略性地使用框架，以期吸引基于地点的认同并促进政治目标。 El encuadre ha sido durante mucho tiempo un constructo central en los estudios sobre el papel de la retorica y el discurso en el proceso de politicas. La investigacion sobre el encuadre de politicas y la identidad hasta ahora ha descuidado el papel de la identidad basada en el lugar, centrandose en cambio en construcciones de identidad como raza, clase, genero y etnia. A traves de un analisis de metodos mixtos de las transcripciones de las reuniones del Concejo Municipal en Filadelfia de 2007 a 2017, analizamos como los formuladores de politicas, los grupos de interes locales y los grupos de interes nacionales / regionales emplean el marco basado en el lugar para definir, explicar y proponer soluciones a problemas ambientales. problemas. Contrastamos los marcos locales basados ​​en el lugar con marcos globales mas amplios y abstractos que centran los argumentos para el cambio de politicas en las implicaciones nacionales o globales de los problemas ambientales. Nuestros resultados revelan que el encuadre basado en el lugar es un modo de discurso dominante en las discusiones de politica ambiental de Filadelfia y que los actores pueden emplear marcos estrategicamente para apelar a las identidades basadas en el lugar y para promover objetivos politicos.

We describe the presence of post-production cost clauses (PCCs) in shale gas leases in two Northeastern Pennsylvania counties. Using a large, random sample of leases (N=1031), we demonstrate (1) how common PCCs are, (2) how frequently landowners address the risks of these clauses directly in the lease, (3) and several factors associated with greater likelihood of landowners addressing PCC risks in a lease. We find that nearly every lease contains language allowing for post-production costs to be taken out of landowner royalty payments, and that the language is often sufficiently general to allow for exploitative industry practices. However, we do find that (1) a small majority of landowners directly address these risks by inserting counter-acting lease terms, and (2) that these alternative lease terms increase over time, indicating a social learning process through which landowners are able to insulate themselves from financial risk. We find that the primary source of variation in landowner efforts to reduce risk is the firm that landowners signed with, expanding on other recent findings. While our study is geographically constrained, the results from this study inform ongoing discussions of equity in unconventional oil and gas development, particularly for landowners who lease privately owned land to the oil and gas industry.

Hunter education (HE) is offered in all 50 states, with oversight provided by state wildlife agencies (SWAs). The vast majority of HE courses are taught by volunteers. Recruiting and retaining volu...

As federal, state, and local governments and agencies respond to calls to make decisions and implement programs according to tenets of ‘good governance’, a need exists to develop methods for system...

Little is known about the conservation of intermittent and ephemeral streams on private lands despite the importance of these waterways for ecosystem and hydrologic outcomes. Our case study of a watershed of central New York State considers landowners' attitudes toward perennial and intermittent streams on their property. We combine social science survey responses with aerial imagery to assess the underlying drivers of landowners' attitudes about their streams, and the extent to which these attitudes shape riparian conservation behaviors on their properties. We find that stream flow regularity directly and positively shapes landowners' stream attitudes, with landowners of perennially flowing streams holding their streams in higher regard than landowners with streams of intermittent flows. Landowners with forest and wetlands as the primary land cover had more riparian buffer coverage on their properties than agricultural landowners. Landowners with a weaker perceived land use efficacy also had greater buffer coverage. Our findings suggest that landowners in headwater regions do not perceive their influence on downstream water quality, and that outreach efforts should emphasize the importance and conservation of headwater streams and associated water quality outcomes.

Insufficient funding is a major impediment to conservation efforts around the world. In the United States, a decline in hunting participation threatens sustainability of the “user‐pay, public benefit” model that has supported wildlife conservation for nearly 100 years, forcing wildlife management agencies to contemplate alternative funding strategies. We investigated support for potential funding options among diverse college students, a rapidly expanding and politically active voting bloc with a potentially powerful influence on the future of conservation. From 2018 to 2020, we surveyed 17,203 undergraduate students at public universities across 22 states. Students preferred innovative approaches to conservation funding, with 72% supporting funding derived from industry sources (e.g., natural resource extraction companies), 63% supporting state sources (e.g., general sales tax), and 43% supporting conventional user‐based sources such as license fees and excise taxes associated with outdoor recreation activities (e.g., hunting). Findings emphasize the need to broaden the base of support for conservation funding and highlight the importance of considering the preferences and perspectives of young adults and other diverse beneficiaries of wildlife conservation.

Environmental management involves the complex interaction between identifying the causes of problems and implementing solutions. Our exploratory study draws on attribution theory to analyze the causal attributions among community members experiencing frequent and intensifying harmful algal blooms in a lake of western New York State. Our interviews (n = 21) revealed that causal attributions were grounded in observation but that scientific observations led to very different causal attributions than direct observations among a subset of the lay public. Some community members also developed causal attributions based on their social relationships. Differences in causal attributions became the basis of widespread intracommunity disagreement, which in turn hampered management efforts. Our work demonstrates the need for meaningful public engagement in water management-engagement that addresses causal beliefs within the community, even if those beliefs may not align with scientific understandings.

Record-breaking fire seasons are becoming increasingly common worldwide, and large wildfires are having extraordinary impacts on people and property, despite years of investments to support social–ecological resilience to wildfires. This has prompted new calls for land management and policy reforms as current land and fire management approaches have been unable to effectively respond to the rapid changes in climate and development patterns that strongly control fire behaviour and continue to exacerbate the risks and hazards to human communities. Promoting social–ecological resilience in rapidly changing, fire-susceptible landscapes requires adoption of multiple perspectives of resilience, extending beyond ‘basic resilience’ (or bouncing back to a similar state) to include ‘adaptive resilience’ and ‘transformative resilience’, which require substantial and explicit changes to social–ecological systems. Clarifying these different perspectives and identifying where they will be most effective helps prioritize efforts to better coexist with wildfire in an increasingly flammable world. Record-breaking fire seasons are becoming the new normal, prompting calls for land management and policy reforms. This Perspective clarifies different types of resilience to wildfire to prioritize efforts to better coexist with increasingly fire-prone conditions.

We address the implications of a latent yet critical assumption in place research: that sense of place is chronically accessible in memory. It is presently assumed that sense of place is a consistently retrieved representation stored memory that is always at the “top of the mind”, with an automatic, inevitable, and robust effect on behavioral outcomes. This assumption is at odds with research in social psychology which asserts that most mental constructs are only temporarily accessible. That is, constructs are often formed on the spot, and compete with other constructs for applicability to a judgment or behavior. We argue that this assumption partially explains the inconsistencies identified in recent reviews of research on the behavioral outcomes associated with person-place bonds. We conclude with an outline of a research program that builds on an assumption of temporary accessibility to explain the relationship between place and behavior. By focusing on the temporary accessibility of place, we can better understand the dynamic interaction between social and psychological factors in shaping person-place bonds.

Collaborative watershed governance (CWG) is one strategy to address nonpoint source water pollution. While many collaborative watershed arrangements unfold in local settings, institutional ...

Place meanings—notions of what a given location is, and what it ought to be—are critical to the social negotiations that produce regulatory and management regimes. These, in turn, contribute to the material social–ecological outcomes that determine both the sustainability of system processes and the ways in which costs and benefits are distributed across society. Ascribed meanings are foundational to the social determination of what constitutes a ‘desirable’ system state, a core concern of resilience-based approaches to managing sustainability transformations. However, place meanings are never simple or unitary—they are diverse, overlapping, and often contested. While such contestations over place meanings may remain latent, at times they erupt into overt social conflict wherein competing narratives of place find visceral, and even violent, expression. Taking a particular case—the armed standoff between ranchers and federal agents at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the United States in early 2016—we examine the ways in which place meanings and associated place claims first informed and then gave rise to violent conflict, and explore the relevance of these for understanding social–ecological processes in contested places and implications for transformation toward sustainability. Tracing the origins of the conflict at Malheur through the contested histories of place-making in the American West, we argue: (1) place meanings are produced and compete across a highly uneven landscape of power wherein some place claims are privileged while others struggle to gain traction; (2) contested place meanings come to particular dominance when they achieve the status of ‘normal’—when they inform the taken-for-granted lenses through which society views a place. However, dominant claims are never hegemonic, always facing the threat of subaltern claims, and so the process of place-making is never finished; (3) place meanings and conflict over these are often brought to our attention in contemporary time involving local places, but they are typically the product of very pre-contemporary and non-local influences and trajectories, pointing to important cross-scalar relationships; and (4) conflict over place meanings and claims, while problematic and sometimes destructive, may also be generative. Conflict provides moments of opportunity wherein latent contestations are surfaced and made explicit, prompting new social negotiations that may lead to new and surprising outcomes. We also explore the implications of contestation over place meanings with regard to the production of social capital and possible roles that place attachment may play in fostering resilience within contested areas and informing efforts to navigate change toward more sustainable futures.

Mail surveys have long been a staple of social science research. Properly conducted, they can gather representative data about a population that provides important generalizations about that popula...

The last 25 years have witnessed growing recognition that natural resource management decisions depend as much on understanding humans and their social interactions as on understanding the interactions between non-human organisms and their environment. Decision science provides a framework for integrating ecological and social factors into a decision, but challenges to integration remain. The decision-analytic framework elicits values and preferences to help articulate objectives, and then evaluates the outcomes of alternative management actions to achieve these objectives. Integrating social science into these steps can be hindered by failing to include social scientists as more than stakeholder-process facilitators, assuming that specific decision-analytic skills are commonplace for social scientists, misperceptions of social data as inherently qualitative, timescale mismatches for iterating through decision analysis and collecting relevant social data, difficulties in predicting human behavior, and failures of institutions to recognize the importance of this integration. We engage these challenges, and suggest solutions to them, helping move forward the integration of social and biological/ecological knowledge and considerations in decision-making.

Civic engagement in environmental management is often seen as linked to sense of place, sometimes with an assumption—explicit or implicit—that strong place attachment promotes a deeper stewardship commitment. This study challenges this idea by arguing that stewardship can develop along different pathways depending on people’s place meanings. We investigate sense of place and stewardship practices by examining three types of civic groups engaged in protecting and restoring waterfronts and water bodies in New York City: environmental groups, community groups and recreational groups. Using semi-structured interviews and Likert scale surveys, we assessed stewardship activities, place attachment and place meanings that group members (n = 31) associate with their site. Our findings show that place meanings help differentiate between groups based on how they currently view the site (as a place of work, a place of home, or a place of use), and the goals of their stewardship. Some groups work to restore what the place was previously, others work to protect what it currently is, while others work to transform their place into something new. These findings demonstrate how stewardship can develop along different pathways, and by taking place meanings into account we can extend knowledge about how sense of place is linked to behavior as well as better describe the different pathways. Place meanings thereby provide a basis for a typology of stewardships that helps describe different roles that civic engagement can take in environmental management.

This paper develops a theoretical argument for how place attachments are forged and become dynamically linked to increasingly common mobility practices. First, we argue that mobilities, rather than negating the importance of place, shift our understanding of place and the habitual ways we relate to and bond with places as distinct from a conception of place attachment premised on fixity and stability. Second, we document how the body of research on place attachment has both reinforced and contested 'sedentaristic' assumptions criticized within the so-called 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences. Third, we present a conceptual framework, built around different modes of interrelation between fixity and flow, as a way to re-theorize, link and balance the various studies of place attachment that have grappled with mobility. Finally, we sketch out the main research implications of this framework for advancing our understanding of place attachment in a mobile world.

Smart meters are a crucial infrastructural feature of a modernizing grid. Smart meters enable dynamic rate structures, a wide range of smart home technologies, energy use feedback, and greater use of distributed renewable energy. Yet, ratepayers are often unfamiliar with smart meters and their benefits, have ambivalent or negative attitudes toward them, and may outright oppose their use. Past research has identified numerous factors that influence acceptance and engagement. However, these factors are tested in isolation and only partially representative of the broader literature on energy technologies. In this study, we compare the relative effect of an expanded range of factors on smart meter acceptance and engagement. We use a survey (N = 609) of homeowners in Ithaca, New York who are part of an upcoming smart meter rollout. We find that, ceteris paribus, familiarity and climate change risk perceptions have the greatest effect on smart meter acceptance, while smart meter acceptance, age, and income have the strongest effect on engagement. Our findings have two primary implications: (1) outreach and communication should focus on increasing familiarity and demonstrating the climate benefits of smart meter enabled products and services; and (2) that outreach and communication is insufficient to increase uptake by all segments of the population.

Youth development (YD) is receiving increased attention in environmental education (EE), yet faces critiques including lack of attention to cultural competency and structural barriers. We explore Y...

Place attachment (PA) is an important motivation to spend time in one's neighborhood, talking to neighbors sociably or about local issues, and rather than flee, to stay and fight—that is, to create social capital and participate in collective efforts to preserve or improve the community. Those efforts are often in response to some perceived threat to residents' health, safety, property, and/or quality of life, and to the very PAs that led to residents' community engagement. This chapter reviews, analyzes, and builds upon theory and research across multiple disciplines on residential community PA and its relationship to psychological and collective responses to environmental threats, with particular attention to energy exploration and extraction. We explore ways in which PA is shaped, nurtured, and experienced within the context of community, and what other community-focused cognitions and behaviors PA influences. The first half of this chapter is organized around the theoretical model of community PA and responses to environmental threats proposed in the prior edition. The current chapter emphasizes applications of community PA via two case studies of the role of PA, place cognition, and social action in response to “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) for shale oil and gas in Bulgaria and the US.

Mexico’s ejidos are shifting away from community-managed, and toward individually managed lands. Shifting land tenure is a mechanism for modern agricultural development that drives changes to landscape patterns, and loss of mature forestland. Such forest conversion is conspicuous across Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Thus, Mexico’s federal government recently identified the peninsula as a high priority region for landscape conservation. However, few studies have examined the link between changes in ejido land tenure and changes in landscape patterns. We examined spatial-temporal relationships between shifting ejido land tenure and subsequent changes to landscape patterns among 710 ejidos (2.5 million ha) across the State of Yucatan. Our analysis focused on a series of years preceding and a series of years following the changes to Mexico’s constitution that legalized parcelization of ejido lands. Our research questions were (1) how have land cover patterns changed over time and (2) after two decades of legal parcelization, did land cover patterns differ between individually managed and community-managed ejido lands? To investigate these questions, we used recent and historic remotely sensed satellite images to map and analyze changes to land cover patterns over 30 years, and related them to changes in land tenure arrangement, particularly among ejidos pre- and post-parcelization. We show that changes in ejido land tenure contributed to changes in land cover patterns, and that individually managed areas and highly parcelized ejidos exhibited a much greater increase in crop and grassland cover, and therefore a much greater increase in deforested lands, than common areas and community-managed ejidos. Moreover, we show that individually managed areas and highly parcelized ejidos exhibited higher annual deforestation rates than common areas and community-managed ejidos. Therefore, our research demonstrates that even in dry tropical forested regions, common property protects forests. We conclude that individually managed and privatized lands, especially for agricultural development, can threaten the conservation potential of community-managed landscapes in Yucatan and beyond.

The impacts of aquatic invasive species (AIS) on the recreational fishery in the Laurentian Great Lakes are of concern to managers and policy makers. Some AIS have the potential to depress sportfish populations, reducing recreational fishing opportunities and damaging local economies. Alternatives that could reduce the threat of AIS could be costly. Assessments of how AIS could affect recreational fishing participation and the economic value derived from it would contribute to the evaluation of these alternatives. We assessed best-case and worst-case scenarios for how a range of AIS could affect recreational fishing participation and economic value. We utilized previously developed scenarios for how AIS could affect sportfish populations as input for a recreational fishing model developed by Ready et al. (2018) . Their model estimated changes in fishing participation and economic value from such scenarios. Given uncertainty in how AIS could affect sportfish, projected effects of AIS on economic value varied widely, with some scenarios likely to have minimal effects and others leading to losses of over $100 million annually. None of the scenarios would lead to a large percentage decrease in recreational fishing in the eight Great Lake states, largely because anglers have numerous inland fishing opportunities. Nevertheless, lakeshore communities dependent on Great Lakes fishing could still suffer considerable economic loss. Collectively the economic valuation of the range of scenarios narrows down the possible impacts on fishing and the economy that decision makers need to consider.

It’s been just over a decade since Unconventional Oil and Gas development began in earnest in the Marcellus Shale, a dense shale formation that, along with the deeper and larger Utica Shale, covers much of the mid-Atlantic United States. Since January 2008, approximately 15,939 wells have been drilled and fracked at 5674 sites across these shales. This decennial documents the pace, scale, and stages of actual development and takes stock of the social science on impacts to communities, people, policies, and culture. We have divided this article into the following sections that are categorized both geographically and thematically: Pennsylvania: Heart of the Marcellus Shale Play, focuses on the plethora of social science research that has occurred on impacts to Pennsylvania communities, health, economics, and agricultural production; West Virginia and Ohio: Legacies of Extraction discusses research on the overlapping historical legacies of extractive industries in the region and details results of original research examining perceived impacts to residents amid complex historical natural resource lineages; and New York: Fracking, Culture and Politics examines how the regulatory process to develop the Marcellus Shale affected both the state and nation’s culture, politics, and policy as one of the most densely populated regions of the US came to grips with hosting the modern-day Oil and Gas Industry. We conclude with a discussion of emerging research opportunities and directions as a new generation of social scientists document future development in the Marcellus and Utica Shales.

We comment on the recent comprehensive review “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management” by Williamson and Nelson (2017, Can. J. For. Res. 47: 1567–1576, doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2017-0252 ). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous barriers facing Canadian forest managers. The underlying functionalist assumptions of such an approach are highly problematic from both a scholarly and a practical policy perspective. We argue that social scientists engaged in climate change research who want to influence policy-making should understand and then empirically apply causal mechanisms. Methods such as process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are promising tools that can be employed in national- or local-level assessments.

Through a social–ecological systems (SES) lens, this qualitative study investigates how place attachment is manifested among young Q’eqchi’ Maya women of Guatemala. Q’eqchi’ women have positive and negative feelings toward social and ecological attributes of their SES, conceptualized as “magnets” and “anchors.” This research was part of a larger project that also studied the impacts of a program called “Women, Agroecology, and Leadership for Conservation” (WALC), which seeks to promote female empowerment and build capacity among Q’eqchi’ women. We analyze findings related to both place attachment and WALC impacts on participants. This analysis is then used to explore implications for long-term sustainability of the biocultural diversity within the Q’eqchi’ Maya SES. Examinations of international development efforts such as WALC cannot fully transcend embedded issues related to the perpetuation of historical colonialist narratives, the imposition of foreign worldviews and assumptions, and power. We argue that while we must better confront these issues, it is equally important that we do not neglect the prevalence and positive impacts of these programs.

The spread of fish pathogens and aquatic invasive species (AIS) is an ongoing challenge in the Great Lakes region. Bait dealers can prevent the spread of fish pathogens and AIS through their business practices and by educating their customers. Little is known, however, about whether and how they fulfill these roles. Licensed bait dealers in the Great Lakes region were surveyed by mail during fall 2013 to assess their awareness and concern about fish pathogens and AIS, actions they took to prevent their spread, and factors influencing these actions. Most bait dealers were aware of AIS and fish pathogens, many were concerned about them, and held beliefs suggesting their desire to take action to prevent their spread. These concerns and beliefs, however, did not always lead to action. We found two factors, not previously examined, that affected the probability of actual behavior. First, we found differences in participation in business practices by whether or not the state/province had regulations pertaining to those business practices. We also found differences by state/province in the degree and type of communication methods used to educate their customers. Second, we found greater economic dependence on bait sales was associated with increased AIS-preventative business actions and communication with customers. If fishery managers want to increase the number of bait dealers taking action to prevent the spread of AIS and fish pathogens, they may wish to promote additional regulations in states and provinces that do not currently have them, or strengthen regulations already in place.

Experimentation as a means of governance for sustainability transitions has been advocated for years by transition scholars and geography scholars. We propose that examining the impact of experimentation requires an understanding of its embeddedness in place as a socio-spatial context. This notion of embeddedness, which conceptually aligns well with the understanding of sense of place, is under-examined in sustainability transitions literature. By conjoining the sense of place and sustainability transition literatures, we conceptualize that sense of place can be one outcome of experimentation fostering sustainability transitions. We examine urban living labs as an open format of urban experimentation, where multiple actors interact with the aim to co-design, test, and implement governance innovations. From the literature, we have distilled three phenomena that relate to a sense of place as mechanisms for transformation: a symbolic understanding or meaning of place; a narrative of place that connects to a transformative vision; and new types of relations between people and place. With this conceptual lens, we analyze our case study, an urban living lab called The Resilience Lab in a neighborhood of the city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Drawing from a longitudinal case study research, we contend that urban living labs can connect a sense of change (transformation) with a sense of place by co-creating new narratives of place, by co-producing knowledge on new practices and new relations between people and place, and by allowing the co-design or (re)establishment of places with symbolic meaning. As such, urban living labs facilitate urban sustainability transitions. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s11625-018-0562-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This study expands existing models of proenvironmental behavior (PEB) to examine the potentially important and interacting influences of nature-based recreation and sense of place on participation in conservation-oriented activities. We tested hypothesized relationships using a structural equation modeling approach that accounted for common behavioral antecedents within a sample of 1,124 nature-based recreationists and property owners in rural counties of New York, USA. We found that place attachment played an important role in strengthening connections between nature-based recreation and PEB. Birdwatching and hunting participation contributed independently and significantly to PEB, both directly and indirectly through effects on place meanings and place attachment. While birdwatching appeared to influence place attachment by impacting environmental place meanings, hunting exerted similar effects by affecting sociocultural place meanings. Ultimately, our synthesis results in the articulation of a ...

Concerns within the conservation community about declining hunting participation and associated conservation consequences have catalyzed hunter recruitment and retention strategies targeting nontraditional hunting populations. One emerging group of interest includes individuals motived to eat food that is grown, raised, produced, or harvested locally. Sometimes referred to as “locavores,” this group has motivated many wildlife agencies and organizations to develop hunting programs focusing on their assumed desire for local wild game. However, little empirical information speaks to locavore interest in harvesting and consuming wild game. We surveyed 1 subgroup: 471 subscribers to a local food-oriented magazine in the Finger Lakes Region of central New York, USA. Most respondents (82%) had eaten wild game at least once, though