Skip to main content
Home / Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Volume 61, Numbers 5-6

A model integrating social-cultural concepts of nature into frameworks of interaction between social and natural systems

Buy Article:

$63.00 + tax (Refund Policy)

Existing frameworks for analysing interactions between social and natural systems (e.g. Social-Ecological Systems framework, Ecosystem Services concept) do not sufficiently consider and operationalize the dynamic interactions between people's values, attitudes and understandings of the human-nature relationship at both individual and collective levels. We highlight the relevance of individual and collective understandings of the human-nature relationship as influencing factors for environmental behaviour, which may be reflected in natural resource management conflicts, and review the diversity of existing social-cultural concepts, frameworks and associated research methods. Particular emphasis is given to the context-sensitivity of social-cultural concepts in decision-making. These aspects are translated into a conceptual model aiming not to replace but to expand and enhance existing frameworks. Integrating this model into existing frameworks provides a tool for the exploration of how social-cultural concepts of nature interact with existing contexts to influence governance of social-ecological systems.

Keywords: environmental behaviour; governance; human-nature relationship; social-ecological system

Document Type: Research Article

Affiliations: 1: Department of Landscape, Spatial and Infrastructure Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Wien, Austria 2: Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden 3: Institute For Science, Innovation and Society, Faculty of Science, Radboud University, GL Nijmegen, Netherlands 4: Economic and Social Sciences Research Unit, Social Sciences in Landscape Research Group, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland 5: Department of Water-Atmosphere-Environment, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Wien, Austria 6: Department of Sustainable Economic Development, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Wien, Austria 7: Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands 8: Department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology, Utah State University, UT, USA 9: Institute of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands 10: School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK 11: Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg C, Denmark 12: Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 13: Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Publication date: 12 May 2018

More about this publication?

Share Content

  • Access Key
  • Free content
  • Partial Free content
  • New content
  • Open access content
  • Partial Open access content
  • Subscribed content
  • Partial Subscribed content
  • Free trial content