Staff profile

What constitutes a successful biodiversity corridor? A Q-study in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa

West, S., R. Cairns, L. Schultz

2016 - Journal / article

‘Success’ is a vigorously debated concept in conservation. There is a drive to develop quantitative, comparable metrics of success to improve conservation interventions. Yet the qualitative, normative choices inherent in decisions about what to measure — emerging from fundamental philosophical commitments about what conservation is and should be — have received scant attention. We address this gap by exploring perceptions of w...

Rethinking social barriers to effective adaptive management

West, S., L. Schultz, S. Bekessy

2016 - Journal / article

Adaptive management is an approach to environmental management based on learning-by-doing, where complexity, uncertainty, and incomplete knowledge are acknowledged and management actions are treated as experiments. However, while adaptive management has received significant uptake in theory, it remains elusively difficult to enact in practice. Proponents have blamed social barriers and have called for social science contributi...

Dwelling in the biosphere: exploring an embodied human–environment connection in resilience thinking

Cooke, B., S. West, W.J. Boonstra

2016 - Journal / article

Resilience has emerged as a prominent paradigm for interpreting and shaping human–environment connections in the context of global environmental change. Resilience emphasizes dynamic spatial and temporal change in social–ecological systems where humans are inextricably interwoven with the environment. While influential, resilience thinking has been critiqued for an under-theorized framing of socio-cultural dynamics. In this ...

Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society

Lidström, S., West, S., Katzschner, T., Pérez-Ramos, M.I., Twidle, H.

2016 - Journal / article

Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict ‘slow violence’ on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of “arresting stories, images and symbols” reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversit...