You and your research team have been very active in local development processes. What is it that you do there?
Yes! We have recently co-organised a series of activities that aims to provide a platform for actors in local contexts to explore visions of alternative land-use futures and how these visions can be enacted in practice. The shared focus has been on capacity-building, ranging across issues such as local food production, fire management, and closer-to-nature forestry. The background to these activities is the climate and nature crisis, which challenges us to fundamentally reconsider our ways of living, producing and consuming.
In the land use sector, new production models, value chains and management methods need to be developed in ways that do not erode the ecosystems that our own and other lives depend upon. At the same time, we need to find ways of working that constructively deal with social unrest and resistance and foster the capacity for and acceptance of change. In this sense, societal transformations are essentially communicative projects.
You mentioned alternative land-use futures. What do you mean by this and what are you studying more specifically? How do you see the role of alternative land-use management in sustainability transformations?
The concept of alternative land-use futures seeks to capture that there are many possible ways of using and relating to the land that differ from dominant approaches. One commonality across our case studies is that we recognise and collaborate with actors who, here and now, think and do differently, or who lack a voice in the public space. Providing a space for them to articulate their perspectives and experiences offer important insights into how current norms, rules and relationships enable and/or hinder alternative ways of thinking and doing in everyday land-use situations. We have also noticed that such co-creation activities themselves are important platforms for building relations, capacity for action, and piloting new ideas. But is also means that we are confronted with and need to navigate ideas and practices not aligned with our own. And that is not trivial for sustainability transformations. I wouldn’t say we are studying alternative land-use futures, we are actively co-producing them. And this co-productive work includes, but is not limited to, critical analysis and deconstruction of dominant approaches. It involves an active development of alternatives.
Ideally, co-creation provides openings for new problem formulations, practices and policy interventions that contributes to transformational change. But initiating and designing co-creation work involves several tricky questions. Who should we engage with, where, when and how? How can we frame our work in ways that reflects global environmental challenges and speaks to perspectives and experiences of locally situated practitioners? Why would people want to work and continue work with us? What do we do when we are confronted with uncomfortable ideas and practices, inconsistent with science-based knowledges?
How do you approach these issues from an environmental communication perspective?
An important part of societal transformations is narrative construction, which exists and develops in parallel at different societal levels. This is why a key dimension in our focus area is about narration and storytelling, which includes policy discourse, and organisational and personal stories. Narratives typically include stories about the past and the future, which shape ideas and actions in the present when it comes to what should be changed, how it should be changed, and by whom. Narratives are fundamental to us as individuals and communities because they structure the way we think, imagine, interpret, make choices, identify with other humans and non-humans, and take action. To change these structuring devices is, as we see it, an important task. As we engage in co-creation, we co-produce narratives of alternative futures and share stories about how these futures can be enacted here and now. In the coming years, we will work to conceptualize and situate our narrative and co-creative approach in the broader research field of environmental communication. So in few years’ time, I hope to be able to provide a more straightforward answer.
One particularly interesting aim of the work you do in your focus area is to seek to “reconnect people and nature” to “bridge the gap between nature and culture,” as you put it. But in a society increasingly detached from a close relationship to nature, where our encounters with and understanding of nature are becoming progressively more mediated by technology, this seems like a challenging aim. What prospects do you see for fostering a closer connection between human beings and nature?
I think we have few alternatives. When we talk about reconnecting and bridging the gap we aim at the divisions between humans-non-humans, nature-culture, body-mind, emotions-logic thinking, which these days appear increasingly irrational. It does not imply that everyone has to produce their own food, that global trade needs to be abandoned, or that technology necessarily distances us from the ecosystems and other species. In fact, in times when a majority of people live in urban areas far away from the places where the food and materials they consume are produced, technology may decrease distance, visualise negative effects, and increase care for the land that supports us.
"Spotlight on, focus area “Transformation”"
You and your research team have been very active in local development processes. What is it that you do there?
Yes! We have recently co-organised a series of activities that aims to provide a platform for actors in local contexts to explore visions of alternative land-use futures and how these visions can be enacted in practice. The shared focus has been on capacity-building, ranging across issues such as local food production, fire management, and closer-to-nature forestry. The background to these activities is the climate and nature crisis, which challenges us to fundamentally reconsider our ways of living, producing and consuming.
In the land use sector, new production models, value chains and management methods need to be developed in ways that do not erode the ecosystems that our own and other lives depend upon. At the same time, we need to find ways of working that constructively deal with social unrest and resistance and foster the capacity for and acceptance of change. In this sense, societal transformations are essentially communicative projects.
You mentioned alternative land-use futures. What do you mean by this and what are you studying more specifically? How do you see the role of alternative land-use management in sustainability transformations?
The concept of alternative land-use futures seeks to capture that there are many possible ways of using and relating to the land that differ from dominant approaches. One commonality across our case studies is that we recognise and collaborate with actors who, here and now, think and do differently, or who lack a voice in the public space. Providing a space for them to articulate their perspectives and experiences offer important insights into how current norms, rules and relationships enable and/or hinder alternative ways of thinking and doing in everyday land-use situations. We have also noticed that such co-creation activities themselves are important platforms for building relations, capacity for action, and piloting new ideas. But is also means that we are confronted with and need to navigate ideas and practices not aligned with our own. And that is not trivial for sustainability transformations. I wouldn’t say we are studying alternative land-use futures, we are actively co-producing them. And this co-productive work includes, but is not limited to, critical analysis and deconstruction of dominant approaches. It involves an active development of alternatives.
Ideally, co-creation provides openings for new problem formulations, practices and policy interventions that contributes to transformational change. But initiating and designing co-creation work involves several tricky questions. Who should we engage with, where, when and how? How can we frame our work in ways that reflects global environmental challenges and speaks to perspectives and experiences of locally situated practitioners? Why would people want to work and continue work with us? What do we do when we are confronted with uncomfortable ideas and practices, inconsistent with science-based knowledges?
How do you approach these issues from an environmental communication perspective?
An important part of societal transformations is narrative construction, which exists and develops in parallel at different societal levels. This is why a key dimension in our focus area is about narration and storytelling, which includes policy discourse, and organisational and personal stories. Narratives typically include stories about the past and the future, which shape ideas and actions in the present when it comes to what should be changed, how it should be changed, and by whom. Narratives are fundamental to us as individuals and communities because they structure the way we think, imagine, interpret, make choices, identify with other humans and non-humans, and take action. To change these structuring devices is, as we see it, an important task. As we engage in co-creation, we co-produce narratives of alternative futures and share stories about how these futures can be enacted here and now. In the coming years, we will work to conceptualize and situate our narrative and co-creative approach in the broader research field of environmental communication. So in few years’ time, I hope to be able to provide a more straightforward answer.
One particularly interesting aim of the work you do in your focus area is to seek to “reconnect people and nature” to “bridge the gap between nature and culture,” as you put it. But in a society increasingly detached from a close relationship to nature, where our encounters with and understanding of nature are becoming progressively more mediated by technology, this seems like a challenging aim. What prospects do you see for fostering a closer connection between human beings and nature?
I think we have few alternatives. When we talk about reconnecting and bridging the gap we aim at the divisions between humans-non-humans, nature-culture, body-mind, emotions-logic thinking, which these days appear increasingly irrational. It does not imply that everyone has to produce their own food, that global trade needs to be abandoned, or that technology necessarily distances us from the ecosystems and other species. In fact, in times when a majority of people live in urban areas far away from the places where the food and materials they consume are produced, technology may decrease distance, visualise negative effects, and increase care for the land that supports us.