Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world

Abstract

The concept of community is often used in environmental policy to foster environmental stewardship and public participation, crucial prerequisites of effective management. However, prevailing conceptualizations of community based on residential location or resource use are limited with respect to their utility as surrogates for communities of shared environment-related interests, and because of the localist perspective they entail. Thus, addressing contemporary sustainability challenges, which tend to involve transnational social and environmental interactions, urgently requires additional approaches to conceptualizing community that are compatible with current globalization. We propose a framing for redefining community based on place attachment (i.e., the bonds people form with places) in the context of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Area threatened by drivers requiring management and political action at scales beyond the local. Using data on place attachment from 5,403 respondents residing locally, nationally, and internationally, we identified four communities that each shared a type of attachment to the reef and that spanned conventional location and use communities. We suggest that as human-environment interactions change with increasing mobility (both corporeal and that mediated by communication and information technology), new types of people-place relations that transcend geographic and social boundaries and do not require ongoing direct experience to form are emerging. We propose that adopting a place attachment framing to community provides a means to capture the neglected nonmaterial bonds people form with the environment, and could be leveraged to foster transnational environmental stewardship, critical to advancing global sustainability in our increasingly connected world.

Coral reef ecosystem services in the Anthropocene

“…Technological innovation has arguably changed how people perceive reefs, for example the use of underwater photography to document the world's reefs in 360 o , making it possible for people to experience reef environments virtually (XL Catlin Seaview Survey, ) (Figure ). These changes can connect reefs to much broader audiences, who are not traditionally considered as benefitting from reef ecosystems (Gurney et al, ).…”

“…360 o , making it possible for people to experience reef environments virtually (XL Catlin Seaview Survey, 2015) (Figure 2). These changes can connect reefs to much broader audiences, who are not traditionally considered as benefitting from reef ecosystems(Gurney et al, 2017).…”

Measuring what matters in the Great Barrier Reef

“…The emotional and physical bond between person and place, which is influenced by experiences, emotions, memories, and interpretations; it often provides a reason for people to live in a specific area (Devine-Wright 2009; Adger et al 2013;Gurney et al 2017) Survey statement: "I live here because of the GBR" Aesthetic appreciation ("Aesthetic")…”

“…Through a workshop involving disciplinary and interdisciplinary experts (predominately social scientists and researchers that focus on ecosystem services) and by reviewing existing literature, we identified the following key cultural values as potentially having high relevance to people's relationship with the GBR: identity, pride in resource status, attachment to place, aesthetic appeal, appreciation of biodiversity, lifestyle, scientific value, and well-being (for descriptions of each value, see Table 1). We referred to existing data from the Social and Economic Long Term Monitoring Program (SELTMP; described below) to evaluate these values for the GBR region Gurney et al 2017). To determine how these key cultural values differed among stakeholder groups, we quantitatively compared the relative rankings of each type of cultural value among seven groups, consisting of domestic tourists, international tourists, local residents, indigenous residents, non-local Australian residents, commercial fishers, and tourism operators.…”

Analysis Framework of China’s Grain Production System: A Spatial Resilience Perspective

“…At present, both the connection and decentralization of system elements, the system dynamics theory [66], the social network theory [67], the environmental gradient theory [68], and the spatial heterogeneity of system elements have all achieved important developments for resilience research. However, scholars become increasingly aware of the importance of spatio-temporal scales within resilience dynamics [69].…”