FosResil · 'Fostering Resilience' in Front-line Environmental Management Practice: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Novel Constellations of Environmental Value in Practice
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-12-01 → 2024-11-30
- EU contribution
- €267,480
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
'Fostering Resilience' in Front-line Environmental Management Practice: A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Novel Constellations of Environmental Value in Practice
In times of climate change, the management of natural areas becomes more challenging due to extreme weather events and more gradual changes. In this context, the policy notion of 'resilience' is increasingly used to talk about the extent to which ecosystems can adapt to such changes without fundamentally altering the core characteristics of the ecosystem. While there is much theoretical debate about the extent to which the idea of 'resilience' is helpful in the context of managing natural areas, so far little empirical attention has been paid to the way it is put into practise in the everyday work of environmental managers. This research proposal responds to this lacuna and is an investigation of the way 'resilience' is put into practice. Specifically it focuses on the empirical question how environmental managers draw on different kinds of knowledges in their everyday work of 'managing for resilience', and on the kinds of value judgments that underlie their work practices. Societally this research underscores the crucial role of front-line workers in shaping our broader response to the risks associates with climate change. In that capacity it also underlines the importance of broadening our conception of climate adaptation and mitigation to include the agency of street-level, or indeed forest-floor, workers.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Environmental management professionals (EMPs) have a crucial role to play in strengthening ecosystems and mitigating the effects of global warming. Given the fundamental unpredictability of climate change-associated events such as draughts or floods, however, EMPs are increasingly asked to 'foster ecosystem resilience', thereby enhancing ecosystems' capacities to bounce back from, or adapt to, unpredictable environmental stressors. As a recently emerged environmental policy paradigm, however, 'resilience' remains a contested concept. Commentators within sociology and the environmental humanities suggest that 'fostering resilience' may in fact preclude political and ethical engagement with the (man-made) stressors on environments, yet these perspectives have not paid empirical attention to resilience in actual environmental management practices. Meanwhile, studies in environmental management point to a concerning lack of comprehensive and empirical studies of the way 'resilience' is actually taking shape in environmental management practice. FosResil is designed to fill these empirical and analytical gaps. By means of a multi-sited ethnography of three pioneering resilience-based initiatives across Western Europe (UK, BE, and NL), FosResil seeks to examine and critically assess the ways in which 'resilience' is currently reshaping environmental management practice. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies in particular, it seeks to analyse how 'resilience' gives rise to novel forms of knowing, valuing, and managing environments. The first synthetic and comprehensive study of the resilience concept in environmental practice, FosResil's seeks to enhance public awareness of environmental management in an age of climate change, foster professional knowledge transfer and exchange, while its pioneering scientific achievement consists of its conceptualization of emerging notions of environmental agency and responsibility as they accompany resilience-in-practice.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN · LeuvenCoordinatorBelgium
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101024490
- https://soc.kuleuven.be/ceso/life-sciences-society-lab/people-1/dr-irene-van-oorschot
Data: CORDIS, © European Union