Concepts of Nature as Communicative Devices: The Case of Dutch Nature Policy

Abstract

The recent widespread shift in governance from the state to the market and to civil society, in combination with the simultaneous shift from the national level to supra-national and sub-national levels has led to a significant increase in the numbers of public and private players in nature policy. This in turn has increased the need for a common vocabulary to articulate and communicate views and values concerning nature among various actors acting on different administrative levels. In this article, we will examine the role of concepts of nature as communicative devices in public debates and political decision-making. We try to show that the now dominant functionalist approach to concepts of nature, due to its focus on interests, threatens to narrow public and political communications to purely strategic negotiations. Instead of this functionalist approach we put forward a structuralist approach, which focuses not on interests but on values.

Evolutionary and socio-cultural influences on feelings and attitudes towards nature: a cross-cultural study

“…This could possibly be explained by the influence of the western environmental movement in the 1970s on some British nationals encouraging ecocentric rather than anthropocentric attitudes. Also Keulartz et al (2004) argue for a shift from a functionalist to a structuralist approach in nature policy in the UK. Therefore, the two attitudes co-exist depending on an individual's perception of nature.…”

“…Keulartz, Van der Windt & Swart (2004), however, in arguing for a shift from a functionalist to a structuralist approach in nature policy, provide a wide-ranging definition of perception of nature. They suggest it is:…”

Integrating Spatially Explicit Representations of Landscape Perceptions into Land Change Research

“…It is well established that this lens is also affected by contextual factors, including those related to cultural and individual experiences (e.g., knowledge, landscape context, socioeconomic factors, or social norms) [13,14,23,24] and images and attitudes that form an individual's worldview. Worldviews have been investigated in multiple studies [25,26] that aim to differentiate individual views of nature and how this translates into perceptions of, interactions with, and activities in landscapes. While not mutually exclusive, an individual's views of landscape can be classed into three categories of human-nature interaction: (1) wild/ wilderness, where human influence is, or should be, absent; Fig.…”

In Search of Religious Elements in the Dutch Nature Policy

“…16 In the following, we will further elaborate on this aspect by approaching views of nature as frames. Keulartz, van der Windt, and Swart (2004) considered views of nature as socio-cultural constructs regarding the character (cognitive dimension), value (normative dimension), and appreciation (expressive dimension) of nature. The cognitive dimension pertains to knowledge of nature.…”

“…When we look at the views of nature within Dutch nature policy, three dominant understandings stand out: the wilderness view of nature, the Arcadian view of nature, and the functional view of nature, summarized in the alliteration 'reposeful' (rustig), 'rough' (ruig), and 'rational' (rationeel) (Keulartz, van der Windt, and Swart 2002).…”