Enabling more Holistic Consideration of Value in Socio-ecological Relationships:: A Well-being Centred Approach

People who are connected to nature feel happier, enjoy time in natural settings and feel grateful for benefits from nature. They also tend to repay nature’s generosity with proenvironmental behaviours. The widespread human-nature disconnect has created an<br/>operating environment where destructive and unsustainable behaviours are tolerated,<br/>enabled, and even celebrated and rewarded. The economic, political, and social views<br/>and norms that perpetuate the fallacious dream of endless growth lie at the heart of the<br/>complex existential challenges facing our future viability. Catalysing the seismic shift<br/>needed in the human-nature relationship requires systemic change, a repositioning of humans in nature and a step change in whose voices, views and values are heard and<br/>considered when it comes to shaping our shared future. I draw on a decade of mixed<br/>methods research, activism, and transdisciplinary practice to develop a novel conceptual model and a typology of benefits that flow from Socio-ecological<br/>Relationships (SER). Rather than framing nature in service of humans and positioning<br/>human well-being as the desired endpoint of benefit flows, I reposition multidimensional well-being at the heart of the model and emphasise the need to pay<br/>attention to reciprocity. I have developed a refined vocabulary of well-being benefit from SER which contributes to scholarly understanding by providing a credible<br/>language to characterise value and benefit, subverting myths of intangibility, impossible complexity and messiness which have perpetuated the omission of much of what<br/>characterises nature connection in human experience from policy and decision-making. Finally, I have operationalised my conceptual framework by applying the novel, filmbased<br/>Community Voice Method to engaging and mobilising communities, developing<br/>an in-person game to enable exploration of diverse benefits, and developing and<br/>refining a novel subjective well-being scale to assess benefit from SER and provided<br/>insights into the relationship between people and the coast and sea in the UK at a population level. While diverse benefits appear to be widely experienced, they are not<br/>equitably distributed and the relationship between benefit and pro-environmental behaviours warrants further attention.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (awarded by UHI)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral Thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of the Highlands and Islands

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Ranger, Susan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bryce, Rosalind

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

oai:pure.atira.dk:studenttheses/fe7ec2f7-1554-460b-b828-e9cb2e7797cf

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:pure.atira.dk:studenttheses/fe7ec2f7-1554-460b-b828-e9cb2e7797cf