1 Tahrcountry Musings: Nature conservation - From stakeholders to stakesharers

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Nature conservation - From stakeholders to stakesharers

Reframing the conception of nature conservation management by transdisciplinary methodology: From stakeholders to stakesharers
Gregor Torkar and Sue L.T. McGregor
Journal for Nature Conservation, Volume 20, Issue 2, March 2012, Pages 65–71

 Nature conservation is all about dealing with human–nature interface problems. Here the researchers examine how the transdisciplinary methodology can help improve community-based conservation approaches.

 The researchers say transdisciplinarity is an extremely promising global movement that promotes a new approach to the creation of human knowledge. It includes dialogue among the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities as well as with civil society, where the problems of the world are lived out on a daily basis. The intent of taking down the walls between the disciplines and civil society is to enable new types of knowledge to emerge through complex and integrated, mutually learned insights.

 The four pillars (axioms) of the transdisciplinary methodology – multiple levels of Reality (ontology), the logic of the included middle, emergent complexity (epistemology) and integral value constellations (axiology) – are explained. The role each one of these axioms plays in reframing our conception of the conservation of nature is also dealt with in detail.

The researchers contend that a transdisciplinary methodology helps everyone feel as if they are stakesharers rather than stakeholders.

 The researchers sign off with the following words “Almost everyone is familiar with the term stakeholder, referring to someone who can affect, or can be affected by others’, decisions. To have a stake in something means people share or have an involvement in it. We coined the term stakesharer to reflect the idea that, within transdisciplinary work, people share ideas, solutions, threats and opportunities as they try to stake out their collective response to human–nature interface problems.”

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