Strengthening Wellbeing in Urban Communities Through Wildlife Gardening

an article by Laura M. Mumaw, Cecily Maller and Sarah Bekessy (RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia) published in Cities and the Environment Volume 10 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

Conserving biodiversity and advancing well-being are goals usually siloed in environment or health portfolios, yet compelling evidence is emerging regarding the relationship between these activities. There is increasing academic and practitioner interest in the well-being benefits to be gained from experiencing nature in urban parks.

Here we explore the understudied relationship between actively conserving nature in urban backyards and gaining well-being benefits. We investigate a municipal wildlife gardening program run by a community group-local government partnership in Melbourne, Australia whose purpose is to conserve the municipality’s indigenous biodiversity.

Semi-structured interviews with program members in their gardens, supplemented by material from open-ended questionnaires from program garden assessors, were analysed for the program’s impact on participants’ well-being. Participants described experiential, social, and eudemonic well-being benefits including strengthened connections with nature, place and community, derived from participating in a program that immersed them in nature at home, gave their gardening a conservation context, and involved local government and community.

These findings demonstrate that initiatives engaging urban residents on their properties to care for nature as part of local government-community collaborations have important well-being and environmental outcomes that should be recognised and further explored in both conservation and well-being policy and program approaches.

Full text (PDF 20pp)

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Green grabbing debate and Madagascar: did we learn anything?

an article by Thorkil Casse (Roskilde University, Denmark), Fara Lala Razafy (WWF DRC, Goma, DRC, Congo) and Zachary Wurtzebach (Colorado State University, USA) published in International Journal of Sustainable Development Volume 20 Number 1/2 (2017)

Abstract

Green grabbing is a scholarly critique of conservation efforts. Scholars of green grabbing argue that many conservation strategies – such as the designation of protected areas and the creation of market-based conservation mechanisms – are designed with the intent to dispossess local peoples and capitalise natural assets.

First, to provide some context on the green grabbing debate, we discuss the trade-offs between conservation and development objectives. In addition, we refer briefly to the broader land grabbing debate of which green grabbing is a sub-component.

Second, we question the theoretical foundations of green grabbing, the concepts of primitive accumulation and commodification of nature.

Third, we compare data collected by the green grabbing scholars and conservation NGOs from the very same site in Madagascar.

We conclude that rigorous post-intervention stakeholder analysis, rather than pre-intervention analysis, is needed to effectively evaluate conservation outcomes, and that research on conservation strategies should pay attention to the role of the state, and the heterogeneity of local communities.

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