Publications

West., S., Haider, J.L., Masterson, V. et al. 2018. Stewardship, care and relational values. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. Available online 5 November 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.10.008

Stewardship is a popular term for describing action in pursuit of sustainability. There is growing interest in how relational values, such as care, animate stewardship action. In this paper we develop relational understandings of care in stewardship, in so doing infusing the relational values literature with modes of ‘relational thinking’ increasingly adopted in sustainability science. We use three theoretical perspectives — d...

Enqvist, J.P., West, S., Masterson, V., Haider, J.L., Svedin, U., Tengö, M. 2018. Stewardship as a boundary object for sustainability research: Linking care, knowledge and agency. Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 179, November 2018, Pages 17-37

Current sustainability challenges – including biodiversity loss, pollution and land-use change – require new ways of understanding, acting in and caring for the landscapes we live in. The concept of stewardship is increasingly used in research, policy and practice to articulate and describe responses to these challenges. However, there are multiple meanings and framings of stewardship across this wide user base that reflect di...

Schultz, L., West, S., Bourke, A.J., d'Armengol, L., Torrents, P., Hardardottir, H., Jansson, A., Roldán, A., M. 2018. Learning to live with social-ecological complexity: An interpretive analysis of learning in 11 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. Global Environmental Change Volume 50, May 2018, Pages 75-87 DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.03.001

Learning is considered a means to achieve sustainability in practice and has become a prominent goal of sustainability interventions. In this paper we explore how learning for sustainability is shaped by meaning, interpretation and experience, in the context of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs). The World Network of Biosphere Reserves brings environmental conservation, socio-economic development and research together in ‘learnin...

West, S., R. Cairns, L. Schultz. 2016. What constitutes a successful biodiversity corridor? A Q-study in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa. Biological Conservation 198: 183 – 192

‘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...

West, S., L. Schultz, S. Bekessy. 2016. Rethinking social barriers to effective adaptive management. Environmental Management 58: 399 – 416

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...

Cooke, B., S. West, W.J. Boonstra. 2016. Dwelling in the biosphere: exploring an embodied human– environment connection in resilience thinking. Sustainability Science 11(3): 1-13. doi: 10.1007/s11625-016-0367-3

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 ...

Lidström, S., West, S., Katzschner, T., Pérez-Ramos, M.I., Twidle, H.2015. Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society. Environmental Humanities, vol. 7, 2015, pp. 1-40

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...

Lidström, S., S. West, T. Katzschner, M.I. Pérez-Ramos, H. Twidle. 2015. Invasive narratives and the inverse of slow violence: Alien species in science and society. Environmental Humanities 7: 1-40.

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 biodivers...

West, S.P., L. Schultz. 2015. Learning for resilience in the European court of human rights: Adjudication as an adaptive governance practice. Ecology and Society 20(1): 31

Managing for social-ecological resilience requires ongoing learning. In the context of nonlinear dynamics, surprise, and uncertainty, resilience scholars have proposed adaptive management, in which policies and management actions are treated as experiments, as one way of encouraging learning. However, the implementation of adaptive management has been problematic. The legal system has been identified as an impediment to adapti...

: West, S., Haider, J., Sinare, H. and Karpouzoglou,T. (2014) Beyond Divides: Prospects for synergy between resilience and pathways approaches to sustainability, STEPS Working Paper 65, Brighton: STEPS Centre

In the context of rapid social, ecological and technological change, there is rising global demand from private, public and civic interests for trans-disciplinary sustainability research. This demand is fuelled by an increasing recognition that transitions toward sustainability require new modes of knowledge production that incorporate social and natural sciences and the humanities. The Social, Technological and Environmental ...