Social scientists of conservation typically address sources of legitimacy of conservation policies in relation to local communities’ or indigenous land rights, highlighting social inequality and environmental injustice. This chapter reflects on the underlying ethics of environmental justice in order to differentiate between various motivations of conservation and its critique. Conservation is discussed against the backdrop of two main ethical standpoints: preservation of natural resources for human use, and protection of nature for its own sake. These motivations will be examined highlighting mainstream conservation and alternative deep ecology environmentalism. Based on this examination, this chapter untangles concerns with social and ecological justice in order to determine how environmental and human values overlap, conflict, and where the opportunity for reconciliation lies, building bridges between supporters of social justice and conservation. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319713113#aboutBook LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
MULTIFILE
Ascertaining the contribution of research is complex; this is not a conclusion but a starting point for the preliminary thoughts in this inaugural lecture. The guiding question is: where does this complexity lie? The dominant answer that has taken root in many practices flattens this complexity into a line. As a handle, or a rule of thumb. The concept of continuous effects serves as a crowbar to break open this one-dimensionality, not least to do more justice to practice-based research at universities of applied sciences. This allows for a different way of looking at how practice-based research contributes to change: from continuous effects ‘stretching each moment to the fullest’ and indicators of the effects of direct interactions, to multiple action perspectives beyond merely generating new knowledge to bring about change.
When corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a sensemaking process is assessed from a corporate governance perspective, this implies that stakeholders do not only influence companies by promoting and enforcing regulations and other corporate guidelines. They also influence companies by promoting regulation on influence pathways, by demanding that companies develop formal mechanisms that allow companies and stakeholders to discuss and in some cases agree on changes to principles and policies. This perspective suggests that regulation is an outcome of power relations and is, as such, a reflection of certain mental models. As such, mental models reveal the political bias in corporate governance perspectives. For this reason, CSR research needs to be clear about the underlying assumptions about corporate governance, and corporate governance research needs to disclose which mental models of CSR influence the outcomes. Taking a governance perspective on the development of mental models of CSR helps to understand the interaction between CSR and processes of sensemaking at the institutional, organizational and individual levels.
