Carolyn Harrison

People, Parks and the Urban Green: A Study of Popular Meanings and Values for Open Spaces in the City

Contemporary provision of open spaces within cities rests largely on professional assumptions about its significance in the lives of residents. This paper presents results from the Greenwich Open Space Project which used qualitative research with four, in-depth discussion groups to determine the design of a questionnaire survey of households in the borough. The research shows that the most highly valued open spaces are those which enhance the positive qualities of urban life : variety of opportunities and physical settings; sociability and cultural diversity. The findings lend some support to the approach of the urban conservation movement but present a fundamental challenge to the open-space hierarchy embodied in the Greater London Development Plan. The Project identifies a great need for diversity of both natural settings and social facilities within local areas and highlights the potential of urban green space to improve the quality of life of all citizens.

Environmental Communication and the Cultural Politics of Environmental Citizenship

This paper presents a comparative analysis of how representatives from the public, private, and voluntary sectors of two cities [Nottingham (United Kingdom) and Eindhoven (The Netherlands)] responded to the challenge of communicating more effectively with citizens about issues of sustainability. The analysis is set in the context of literature about the need to widen participation in the determination of Local Agenda 21 policies, and the drive for more inclusionary forms of communication in planning and politics. Workshop members discussed the results of surveys and in-depth discussion groups with local residents which had revealed considerable scepticism and mistrust of environmental communications and environmental expertise. Three themes are explored. First, there is consensus in attributing responsibility for public alienation and resistance to environmental communications to the content and styles of media reporting. Second, there are contrasting discursive constructions of the ‘public’, which reflect different political cultures—with the Nottingham workshop supporting a strategy to share power and knowledge more widely than hitherto, whereas the Eindhoven strategy proposed greater rigour, clarity, and authority from the local state. Third, responding to evidence of public resistance to calls for more sustainable practices, workshop participants in both cities focused on what institutions themselves can and should do to progress environmental goals. Workshop participants in both countries acknowledged the urgent need for public, private, and voluntary sector organisations to match their own practices to their environmental rhetoric.

Exploring environmental values through the medium of small groups: 1. Theory and practice

Empirical qualitative research is gaining recognition within social and humanistic geography, although the ‘small group’ is not yet recognised as a valuable research technique. In this paper we review the use of once-only group interviews in social and market research, and then discuss the principles of Group-analytic psychotherapy as a way of conducting in-depth small groups. By means of a discussion of the Greenwich Open-Space Project, we explore the methodological issues involved in conducting in-depth small groups with local people, discuss the interpretive strategies which can be used to handle large amounts of linguistic data, and present the major findings from the project.

Knowledges in action: an actor network analysis of a wetland agri-environment scheme

Abstract Agri-environment schemes have been developed by the member states of the European Union over the last 10 years. Under Regulation 2078/92, the UK has supported English Nature in the implementation of a nature conservation scheme for wet grazing land in southern England. This paper explores the different understandings of nature held by farmers and conservationists who are participating in the Wildlife Enhancement Scheme, by drawing on qualitative research completed between 1993 and 1995. Through the application of actor network theory, the analysis compares the role and identity ascribed to farmers by conservationists with the identity that farmers’ construct of themselves. The former construct farmers as technicians, ignorant of the workings of nature, whereas the farmers see themselves as ‘natural conservationists’. The paper explores how nature is translated differently in the worlds of conservation science and agriculture. In the final part of the paper, discussion focuses on the management of the wetland ditches where these sets of translations come together. It reveals that the rigid, scientific prescriptions for management of the conservation value of the ditches are considerably at odds with the more flexible and sensitive practices of farmers themselves.

''I struggled with this money business'': respondents' perspectives on contingent valuation

Abstract In the long-running debates about the validity and legitimacy of contingent valuation (CV), very little research has engaged directly with respondents during or after the survey to explore what individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) figure meant. This paper presents the results of qualitative research with respondents to a CV survey carried out as part of the appraisal of a specific nature conservation policy in the UK. The results show that respondents’ questioned the validity of their WTP figures through discussion of the difficulties they experienced in framing a meaningful reply. Significant difficulties included problems in contextualising what the scheme was and how much it might be worth in both monetary and non-monetary terms; an inability to work out a value for one scheme in isolation from others in other parts of the UK; and feelings that values for nature were not commensurable with monetary valuation. Turning to the legitimacy of CV, participants in the research challenged claims that CV is a democratic process for ensuring that public values are incorporated in policy decisions. Recognizing that hard economic choices have to be made in order to achieve nature conservation goals, participants argued for a decision-making institution where local people could contribute to environmental policy decisions through dialogue with scientists and policy-makers. In the final part of the paper, this project is compared with three studies that have also used qualitative approaches with respondents during and/or after a CV survey. The paper concludes that more context-specific, qualitative research with respondents is needed to explore further the conclusion that CV may not be a good methodology for capturing complex, cultural values for nature and landscape.

Exploring environmental values through the medium of small groups: 2. Illustrations of a group at work

In this paper we present the discussions of the Eltham group in the Greenwich Open-Space project, as a case study of the contributions that in-depth small groups can make in the study of environmental values. The major themes of the group discussions are presented, and extracts of dialogue illustrate several aspects of small-group dynamics: how the group establishes its identity, how members negotiate increasing levels of intimacy and trust, how they handle conflict among themselves, and how they deal with termination. These themes demonstrate the importance of the group matrix, the levels of manifest and latent meaning in discourse, and the role of the conductor in facilitating the group structure and processes. We conclude that in-depth small groups are a valuable research strategy for the exploration of the interpenetration of individual and collective values for environment.

Rationalizing environmental responsibilities: A comparison of lay publics in the UK and the Netherlands

Abstract The results from a cross-cultural study of citizens in Nottingham (UK) and Eindhoven (NL) carried out in 1993–1994 are discussed in this paper. Drawing on the results of household surveys and in-depth single gender discussion groups conducted in both cities, the paper compares the extent to which members of the general public are actively engaged in pro-environmental behaviours, before focusing on the discursive rationalizations through which men and women justify their willingness or refusal to accept environmental responsibilities. The study shows that the level of pro-environmental behaviour is much higher among the Dutch sample than among the English sample on all indicators. The key constraints inhibiting the fuller acceptance of personal responsibility among citizens in both countries are shown to be first, the extent to which individuals are able to make judgements about the validity of environmental rhetoric and expert claims based on personal and local knowledge as well as mass media. Second, the increasingly confused and contingent nature of environmental ‘truths’ which is encouraging cynicism and doubt among lay publics; and finally, the extent to which trust relations exist between citizens and government in which both acknowledge their rights and responsibilities.

Valuing nature in context: the contribution of common-good approaches

We draw on a number of empirical studies undertaken in the UK to show how residents and farmers come to contest scientific approaches to valuing nature as the basis for adjudicating conflicts over protected natural areas. The findings of these studies suggest that a widening of the knowledge base on which the goals and practices of nature conservation are founded, and a more deliberative process of decision making about what nature is important locally, is required if effective conservation partnerships are to be sustained. We offer a common good approach to valuing nature as a means of addressing this problem. A common good approach is based on ethical and moral concerns about nature and expresses these values through a social and political process of consensus building. We illustrate how this common good approach can be used to prioritise issues in a Local Environment Agency Plan. When linked with a method of Stakeholder Decision Analysis this common good approach is capable of building coalitions and a measure of consensus between different interests. It achieves this through a transparent and deliberate process of debate and systematic analysis of values that makes explicit the foundation of different knowledge claims about nature.

Culture, communication, and the information problem in contingent valuation surveys: a case study of a Wildlife Enhancement Scheme

Contingent valuation (CV) is a technique for providing estimates of the monetary value of public goods which have no market. The authors consider whether the information provided for the hypothetical market enables respondents to express their ‘true’ preference for the ‘good’, or whether their willingness to pay is dependent on the quantity and quality of information provided in the survey. They argue that a cultural perspective in which the CV transaction is viewed as a communicative ‘dialogue-at-a-distance’ between researchers and respondents through the medium of the CV text provides more insight into the encoding and decoding of the ‘good’—in this case an agri-environment policy to enhance nature conservation on an internationally significant wetland in South East England. They argue that, within its own scientific parameters, CV surveys are unable to capture fully all the aspects of the ‘good’ to be valued. The problem is more acute when the ‘good’ represents the uncertain outcomes (in terms of landscape and biodiversity) of a policy. Without a complete specification, which may well be an impossibility for environmental ‘goods’, respondents are able to bring their own readings to their interpretation of the scenario. This means that CV researchers cannot know precisely what ‘good’ respondents were attempting to ‘value’. The authors follow the production of the CV scenario for the valuation of the Pevensey Levels Wildlife Enhancement Scheme; conduct a critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how the linguistic and visual representations inevitably fulfil rhetorical functions; and then present the deliberations of respondents to the CV survey who participated in in-depth discussion groups after completion of the survey.

Recovery of lowland grassland and heathland in Southern England from disturbance by seasonal trampling.

Abstract The recovery of a range of semi-natural grassland and heathland plots in southern England is described after disturbance by measured amounts of seasonal trampling. After 2000 passages during a summer period, all plots recover more than 50% live cover in a few weeks of autumn growth. Calluna heathland is an exception and does not recover. After 400 passages during a winter period initial damage is high on grassland plots on clay soils but other grassland plots recover than 50% live cover after a period of six weeks of spring growth. Calluna heathland shows a delayed response to winter trampling and does not recover. Plots trampled both in summer and winter show cumulative effects of wear. These results are compared with those from upland communities.