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Exploring the Nexus between Environmental and Social
People are not divorced from the environment, and the work of a social scientist studying four communities within the ecologically diverse Gondwana region in Western Australia will contribute to better understanding people’s behavior and attitudes toward their local environment and developing new methodologies to engage the community in meeting local sustainability challenges.
Dr. Amma Buckley, an Alcoa Foundation Conservation & Sustainability Research fellow at Curtin University’s Alcoa Research Centre for Stronger Communities, is bringing her social experience into an environmental context to study what happens in an environmentally fragile environment when there are competing forces, such as mining, agriculture, and an influx of new residents.
“To understand particular aspects of the environment, we need local knowledge,” said Dr. Buckley. “We’re using social instruments to measure people’s attitudes toward the environment, and we’re asking the locals—people normally outside the reach of research—to help us both design those instruments and then use them to collect the data. We also plan to give cameras to the residents so they can take photos of what they like and dislike about their environment. This will give us very different imagery about how they view their surroundings.”
Giving people a voice and having them participate will, she feels, make them more likely to listen to sustainability messages and perhaps modify behaviors that negatively impact the environment. Her work in engaging the local community is laying the groundwork for future research that she and others, including Curtin’s future Conservation & Sustainability Research fellows, will conduct in the Gondwana region. The outcomes will be far-reaching, as community engagement is becoming increasingly recognized as critical to successful sustainability initiatives anywhere in the world.
“This fellowship program is linking people in the field with an academic program,” said Dr. Buckley. “It’s a reciprocal relationship, because the field researchers have such good local knowledge they can flag an issue that those in academia can frame in a way that it becomes more powerful. It puts a different slant and perspective on the topic and might break through with a fresh environmental message.”
She adds, “The interdisciplinary approach of the fellowship program gives you a broader view of a particular situation. From the perspective of someone who’s a social researcher working on an environmental issue, I think it’s a great opportunity to bring a different slant and influence and, in turn, be influenced. There is a nexus between environmental and social, and that’s what we are exploring in one of the world’s most important conservation regions.”
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