Q is a semi-qualitative methodology to identify typologies of perspectives. It is appropriate to address questions concerning diverse viewpoints, plurality of discourses, or participation processes ...across disciplines. Perspectives are interpreted based on rankings of a set of statements. These rankings are analysed using multivariate data reduction techniques in order to find similarities between respondents. Discussing the analytical process and looking for progress in Q methodology is becoming increasingly relevant. While its use is growing in social, health and environmental studies, the analytical process has received little attention in the last decades and it has not benefited from recent statistical and computational advances. Specifically, the standard procedure provides overall and arguably simplistic variability measures for perspectives and none of these measures are associated to individual statements, on which the interpretation is based. This paper presents an innovative approach of bootstrapping Q to obtain additional and more detailed measures of variability, which helps researchers understand better their data and the perspectives therein. This approach provides measures of variability that are specific to each statement and perspective, and additional measures that indicate the degree of certainty with which each respondent relates to each perspective. This supplementary information may add or subtract strength to particular arguments used to describe the perspectives. We illustrate and show the usefulness of this approach with an empirical example. The paper provides full details for other researchers to implement the bootstrap in Q studies with any data collection design.
•We identify a discrete number of human-nature relational models.•This approach stresses the importance of cognitive frameworks in environmental valuation.•Relational models are constituted by a ...particular set of social conventions (grammar).•Environmental valuation methods should consider the diversity of such grammars.•Socio-environmental conflicts might reflect alternative relational models by different social groups.
This article aims to contribute to the debate about the role of relational values in environmental decision making, by putting forward a typology of ‘human-nature relational models’. We argue that human-nature relational models, which stress the notion of cognitive frameworks, can be useful to understand core drivers of individual and social behavior that underlie environmental change and socio-environmental conflicts. A ‘relational models’ approach calls for taking into consideration the diversity of cognitive frameworks conditioning our interaction with nature, with the ultimate goal of avoiding, mitigating, transforming and resolving socio-environmental conflicts and achieving a wiser relationship with the natural environment.
Assessing nature's contributions to people Díaz, Sandra; Pascual, Unai; Stenseke, Marie ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2018, Volume:
359, Issue:
6373
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Recognizing culture, and diverse sources of knowledge, can improve assessments
A major challenge today and into the future is to maintain or enhance beneficial contributions of nature to a good ...quality of life for all people. This is among the key motivations of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a joint global effort by governments, academia, and civil society to assess and promote knowledge of Earth's biodiversity and ecosystems and their contribution to human societies in order to inform policy formulation. One of the more recent key elements of the IPBES conceptual framework (
1
) is the notion of nature's contributions to people (NCP), which builds on the ecosystem service concept popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) (
2
). But as we detail below, NCP as defined and put into practice in IPBES differs from earlier work in several important ways. First, the NCP approach recognizes the central and pervasive role that culture plays in defining all links between people and nature. Second, use of NCP elevates, emphasizes, and operationalizes the role of indigenous and local knowledge in understanding nature's contribution to people.
Although conservation efforts have sometimes succeeded in meeting environmental goals at the expense of equity considerations, the changing context of conservation and a growing body of evidence ...increasingly suggest that equity considerations should be integrated into conservation planning and implementation. However, this approach is often perceived to be at odds with the prevailing focus on economic efficiency that characterizes many payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Drawing from examples across the literature, we show how the equity impacts of PES can create positive and negative feedbacks that influence ecological outcomes. We caution against equity-blind PES, which overlooks these relationships as a result of a primary and narrow focus on economic efficiency. We call for further analysis and better engagement between the social and ecological science communities to understand the relationships and trade-offs among efficiency, equity, and ecological outcomes.
One of the main debates surrounding payments for ecosystem services (PES) is to what extent should PES design focus on social equity concerns. While much of the debate is centered around theoretical ...arguments, here we focus empirically on the question of whether there are trade-offs between social-environmental effectiveness and social equity in PES design and implementation. Towards this end, we use a survey targeted at 61 PES practitioners in 12 Latin American countries, where equity is treated in a multidimensional way, not only including distributional concerns but also elements of recognition and procedure, reflected across a set of 15 indicators. Results suggest that PES which practitioners describe as being more equitable are also perceived to be more successful in jointly achieving the social-environmental goals of the PES program they are involved with. This suggests that from a practitioner perspective a concern for social equity may be advocated for not only from a normative stance (“because it is the right thing to do”), but also for instrumental reasons (“because it may contribute to PES success”).
•PES that practitioners perceive to be more socially equitable are better able to achieve their social-environmental goals.•According to practitioners, increasing equity in PES does not necessarily require tradeoffs with environmental effectiveness.•Social equity in PES is seen as a multidimensional concept by practitioners, extending beyond purely distributive aspects.
This article provides an alternative and novel theoretical approach to the conceptualization and analysis of payments for environmental services (PES). We devote special emphasis to institutional and ...political economy issues, which have been somewhat neglected in the literature on PES. We argue that the Coasean and pure market approach dominating the conceptualization of PES in the literature cannot be easily generalized and implemented in practice. By contrast, taking into account complexities related to uncertainty, distributional issues, social embeddedness, and power relations permits acknowledging the variety of contexts and institutional settings in which PES operate. The alternative approach presented in this introductory article to the special section may be more appealing to PES practitioners, since while avoiding restrictive and prescriptive standpoints, it allows some key sources of complexities they usually deal with on the ground to be more easily understood.
•Expert knowledge and perceptions can inform resilience and transformation management.•Stakeholders’ cognitions of an urban energy system are modelled through a fuzzy cognitive approach.•Low carbon ...energy scenarios are developed and compared in terms of resilience and sustainability.•Connectivity is a double-edged sword in resilience and transformation management.•A Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping approach can guide transformative policies and identify unintended impacts.
Transformative change for urban sustainability and resilience calls for the use of new governance approaches that take into account the complexity of urban systems and associated stakeholder knowledge and perceptions. This raises the need to explore the cognitive dimension in the management of urban resilience and transformation. The article presents a Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping approach to develop plausible policy scenarios that support the decarbonisation of the urban energy system of the city of Bilbao, Basque Country. Scenario results indicate that a combination of local institutional and social action may be most conducive for stimulating effective and sustainable transformation of Bilbao's urban energy system. We address the properties of the resulting cognitive network, with a focus on the role of the energy system's connectivity which is found to present conflicting potential for resilience and transformation.
Most current approaches focused on vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation to climate change frame gender and its influence in a manner out-of-step with contemporary academic and international ...development research. The tendency to rely on analyses of the sexdisaggregated gender categories of 'men' and 'women' as sole or principal divisions explaining the abilities of different people within a group to adapt to climate change, illustrates this problem. This framing of gender persists in spite of established bodies of knowledge that show how roles and responsibilities that influence a persońs ability to deal with climate-induced and other Stressors emerge at the intersection of diverse identity categories, including but not limited to gender, age, seniority, ethnicity, marital status, and livelihoods. Here, we provide a review of relevant literature on this topic and argue that approaching vulnerability to climate change through intersectional understandings of identity can help improve adaptation programming, project design, implementation, and outcomes.
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