Environmental Stewardship and the Virtuous Cycle: Pathways to Sustainability in a Coastal Context

Life on earth faces ongoing and growing anthropogenic threats. The need for sustainability through effective environmental stewardship is urgent, yet current concepts and frameworks are insufficient to achieve the sustainability agenda. Novel social-ecological research is required to better understand human-environment relationships, to balance the historic trend towards environmental pessimism with more positive opportunities for change, and to develop empirically grounded theories to inform real-world conservation outcomes. The aim of this thesis is to contribute new knowledge regarding effective environmental stewardship, the “virtuous cycle” of improving social and ecological outcomes, and sustainability. To achieve this, I investigated stewardship policies, actions, and their social and ecological outcomes in Australian coastal contexts. I gathered data over several years and four studies, spanning a range of scales from a single bioregion on the east coast of Australia to 56 sites over five States and 7000 km of coastline in southern Australia. My research questions explored the effectiveness of institutional stewardship policies in marine protected areas, the understanding and measurement of local environmental stewardship in people and places, and the depth of evidence to support (or not support) the virtuous cycle. I found empirical support for the virtuous cycle in the form of improving, mutually reinforcing social and ecological outcomes as a pathway to sustainability (Chapter 5 of this Thesis). These outcomes were driven by both institutional and local environmental stewardship, which operated separately but were strongest in combination. Institutional stewardship, in the form of marine protected areas, is effective under full protection but not partial protection (Chapter 4) and can work in small protected areas provided they are well-designed and managed and supported by the local community (Chapter 2). Local environmental stewardship comprises seven actions which can be quantified and is predicted by social-ecological factors such as attraction to wildlife and self-identification as local (Chapter 3). I conclude by presenting: (i) a new conceptual model - the Sustainability Spiral; (ii) policy and management implications including design guidelines for effective marine protected areas; (iii) strategies to increase local environmental stewardship; and (iv) general recommendations to enable the establishment of virtuous cycles for a sustainable future.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Turnbull, John ; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8935-1012

• Social-ecological systems
• Conservation
• Environmental stewardship
• Sustainability
• Marine protected areas
• anzsrc-for: 4104 Environmental management

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY 4.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/23939

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/100232