Enabling more Holistic Consideration of Value in Socio-ecological Relationships:

: A Well-being Centred Approach

Abstract

People who are connected to nature feel happier, enjoy time in natural settings and feel grateful for benefits from nature. They also tend to repay nature’s generosity with proenvironmental behaviours. The widespread human-nature disconnect has created an
operating environment where destructive and unsustainable behaviours are tolerated,
enabled, and even celebrated and rewarded. The economic, political, and social views
and norms that perpetuate the fallacious dream of endless growth lie at the heart of the
complex existential challenges facing our future viability. Catalysing the seismic shift
needed in the human-nature relationship requires systemic change, a repositioning of humans in nature and a step change in whose voices, views and values are heard and
considered when it comes to shaping our shared future. I draw on a decade of mixed
methods research, activism, and transdisciplinary practice to develop a novel conceptual model and a typology of benefits that flow from Socio-ecological
Relationships (SER). Rather than framing nature in service of humans and positioning
human well-being as the desired endpoint of benefit flows, I reposition multidimensional well-being at the heart of the model and emphasise the need to pay
attention to reciprocity. I have developed a refined vocabulary of well-being benefit from SER which contributes to scholarly understanding by providing a credible
language to characterise value and benefit, subverting myths of intangibility, impossible complexity and messiness which have perpetuated the omission of much of what
characterises nature connection in human experience from policy and decision-making. Finally, I have operationalised my conceptual framework by applying the novel, filmbased
Community Voice Method to engaging and mobilising communities, developing
an in-person game to enable exploration of diverse benefits, and developing and
refining a novel subjective well-being scale to assess benefit from SER and provided
insights into the relationship between people and the coast and sea in the UK at a population level. While diverse benefits appear to be widely experienced, they are not
equitably distributed and the relationship between benefit and pro-environmental behaviours warrants further attention.

Date of Award	27 Jun 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of the Highlands and Islands
Sponsors	Marine Conservation Society & Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Supervisor	Rosalind Bryce (Supervisor)