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Issue 13.2 Abstracts

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Meat, Medicine, and Materialism: A Dialectical Analysis of Human Relationships to Nonhuman Animals and Nature

By Stefano B. Longo and Nicholas M. Malone

The idea that humans are innately competitive and cruel is a dominant theme throughout Western thought. These notions that legitimate human cruelty to each other and other animals have their origins in biological sciences and have greatly influenced the social sciences. Sociologists, particularly Marxist sociologists, however, have often contested this view of human nature. This notion has also come under fire by evolutionary biologists. In line with these critical analyses, this paper will continue to challenge this theory of human nature principally through examination of human relations to nonhuman animals, and secondarily in reference to nature as a whole. Approaching this from a dialectical materialist perspective, we employ an interdisciplinary approach and reject reductionist, idealist and teleological explanations. We attempt to uncover the underlying structures that promote the competitive and cruel (exploitative) nature of humanity, illustrating this in terms of agribusiness and biomedical research.

Keywords : dialectical materialism, animal cruelty, human nature, agribusiness, biomedical research

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The Social Dimension in Ecosystem Management: Strengths and Weaknesses of Human-Nature Mind Maps

By Marion Glaser

The theoretical underpinnings of various analyses of the social dimensions of ecosystem management are closely related to our mental models of human-nature relations. This article presents examples of eco- and anthropocentric, interdisciplinary and complex system mind maps of human-nature relations. It shows that the interpretation of the social dimension in ecosystem management in each mind map advances the study of human-nature relations in a particular way. However, the dysfunctional reductionism of eco-and anthropocentric mind maps and the weak capacity of interdisciplinary mind maps to analyse intersystem and cross-scale linkages is only overcome by complex system approaches. Different types of complex systems mind maps are found capable of comprehensively operationalising the social dimension of ecosystem management for monitoring purposes and also of linking a variety of knowledge types in integrative analyses to support resilience-oriented management. The participation of system stakeholders in transformative and adaptive transdisciplinary work is central in these endeavours.

Keywords : ecosystem management, social dimensions, human-nature relations, mind maps

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Ecological Paradoxes: William Stanley Jevons and the Paperless Office

By Richard York

Here I draw attention to two socio-ecological paradoxes. The Jevons Paradox is based on the observation that an improvement in the efficiency with which a natural resource is used is often associated with an increase in the consumption of that resource. Similarly, the Paperless Office Paradox is based on the observation that the development of substitutes for a natural resource is not always associated with a decline in consumption of that resource, and in fact may occasionally lead to an increase in the consumption of that resource. These two paradoxes call into question whether technological advances alone, such as improvements in efficiency and the development of alternatives to natural resources, will necessarily lead to conservation of natural resources.

Keywords: Jevons paradox, paperless office, eco-efficiency

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Critical Next Steps in Research in Public Participation in Environmental Decision Making

By Kathleen E. Halvorsen

Research on public meetings and environmental decision making has increased greatly over the past 30 years. Much published research evaluates specific public meeting techniques or officials' and participants' expectations regarding public meetings. However, three questions remain largely unexplored. First, why do or don't people attend public meetings? Research suggests that beliefs and values regarding a meeting's topic are important, but work on this question remains limited. Second, how does working with the public affect decision makers and their willingness to conduct future public meetings? Few researchers have worked on this question. Third, how does public meeting input affect decision making? A great deal of research describes cases where input fails to influence decision making. However, few studies have presented and explained successful incorporation of public input into decision making. Answering these questions is critical to moving forward with the next generation of effective citizen involvement through public meetings.

Keywords: citizen involvement, public meetings, decision making

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Cooperative Research: Engaging Stakeholders in Coastal, Marine and Fisheries Research in the Northwest Atlantic

By Troy Hartley and Robert Robertson

Cooperative research among fisheries scientists, industry and managers in the Northwest Atlantic has expanded since 2000, in part due to increasingly disputed science, adversarial politics, and socioeconomic hardship. Surveys of individuals actively engaged in commercial fishing in New England (n=295), and fishermen (n=60) and scientists (n=37) participating in Northeast Consortium-funded cooperative research examined improvements in stakeholder engagement, the distinction between levels of cooperation, and the extent that cooperative research reflects democratic science. We found that through cooperative research, fishermen and scientists are more informed about science and fishing, respectively. These fishermen are more likely to believe the science to be credible. Fishermen and scientists report greater mutual understanding, trust, and likelihood of long-lasting partnerships. Fishermen in particular, but scientists as well, became more active in management after participating in cooperative research. Multiple participation choices are important to ensure broader participation. Last, fishermen and scientists remain skeptical about cooperative research's impact on management.

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Managing Public Engagement to Optimize Learning: Reflections from Urban River Restoration

By Judith Petts

In the context of the growth in support for deliberative decision-making, this paper presents a new examination of an important and as yet largely ignored question of just how a deliberative process can capitalize on local knowledge and lead to shared (expert and public) learning and understanding. It speaks to both the academic and practitioner through a set of reflections upon the nature and demands of engagement management. Drawing upon a recent urban river restoration project in the UK, the subject of an innovative form of engagement, it identifies and examines the key management elements, i.e. the recruitment of representative interests; active facilitation; collaborative framing; optimizing interaction; and managing the unexpected. The paper concludes that both public and expert can learn if the right conditions for listening, sharing, reflecting on preferences and adapting are created and managed, and identifies the theoretical and practical implications.

Keywords: public engagement, deliberation, learning, environmental decision-making, urban river restoration, Water Framework Directive

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Organizational Learning about Agency Participation: The Enthusiastic and the Constrained

By Caron Chess and Branden B. Johnson

The perceptions of “public” members of participation processes have been studied far more than those of agency personnel. To improve the practice of public participation, this study, using Q analysis, explores how personnel from one agency view their experience, expertise, and learning with regard to communication with the public, including but not limited to public participation. Without organizational learning, which is more than the aggregation of individual learning, inferences from history will be lost. We found two perspectives: the Enthused (“Tiggers”), who focus on the support they receive for communication activities, including learning, and the Constrained (“Eeyores”), who see the limitations of their program and their own learning. The differences in the perspectives were not associated with agency unit, level of hierarchy, communication training, or tenure in the agency. We suggest ways to promote interchange among these participants through double-loop learning, which has similarities to the interactive, recursive processes that can integrate analysis and deliberation.

Keywords : public participation, risk communication, government, organizational learning

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From the Forest to the River: Citizens' Views of Stakeholder Engagement

By Gregg B. Walker, Susan L. Senecah, and Steven E. Daniels

Since the early 1990s collaboration and consensus processes have become associated with success in the environmental policy and natural resource policy arenas. Interest in collaboration and consensus processes have emerged, in part, out of a frustration with more conventional efforts used to involve stakeholders, to work though conflicts, and to make decisions in the environmental and natural resource policy arenas. Collaboration and consensus processes, when designed well and applied appropriately, provide opportunities for meaningful stakeholder engagement.

This essay features aspects of two government-led or agency-based (Koontz et al. 2004; Moore and Koontz 2003) planning efforts that consider collaboration and citizens/stakeholder engagement. Both projects, a forest management plan revision on the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, and a regional sediment management planning effort at the mouth of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, have considered a Collaborative Learning (CL) approach (Daniels and Walker 2001) for stakeholder involvement. As part of these CL applications, citizens/stakeholders have been asked for their views of the kind of participation processes they value and how they prefer to be involved. This essay presents a summary of citizens' ideas. In doing so, it addresses the question: How do stakeholders want to be engaged in agency-led planning efforts? Data reveal that stakeholders prefer active engagement, access to information and events, and clearly defined decision space. Prior to presenting the project data germane to this question, the paper highlights the trinity of voice and Collaborative Learning.

Keywords: collaborative processes, Collaborative Learning, stakeholder involvement