Publications in Ecosystems and People

Various scholars have criticized that formal Western thinking was dichotomous and substantialist, leading to an alienation from nature and to its exploitation in industrialized societies. Critics argue that a relational turn towards a more holistic, process-based and relational approach to address the world would be an important step to overcome these problems. Such a relational turn involves a shift towards more flexible and inclusive concepts. We analyse ‘nature’ concepts of local stakeholders in Swiss nature parks to examine whether they contain any relational elements. Indeed, we found that all stakeholders interviewed see themselves as part of nature. Many reported how they experience nature in active processes and see nature as a collaborator and partner. Moreover, they do not strictly separate between natural and cultural elements in their environment. We conclude that a relational turn in environmental policy in Western countries could build on these relational elements in nature concepts of the local population.

Ecologically considerate use of nature (including agriculture) has often been associated with ‘stewardship’ as a human-nature relationship which involves human care, responsibility and accountability and is thus more sustainable than the alternative human-nature relationship of manager of nature. We show that the consideration of nature in agriculture can go further than stewardship by presenting data from qualitative interviews with Swiss Alpine farmers indicating that many of them view their relationship with nature as a form of partnership. Drawing on literature of human-nature partnership, we characterize this relationship by 1) bidirectionality – a give and take between nature and humans–, 2) the understanding of nature as a subject rather than an object and 3) interaction with nature that consists of collaboration rather than giving commands. The mountain farmers expressed all of these features in their farming practices and descriptions of their role in nature. A few farmers even saw their role as subordinates to nature, for which we introduced the new human-nature relationship category of “apprenticeship”. We further suggest that the partnership relation between humans and nature in many respects shares key features with relational values, for instance in its non-centric nature and in its emphasis of the combination of benefits for people with care for nature. In that sense, we aim at combining different accounts of inclusive, non-dichotomous and context-sensitive dealings with nature and we suggest that this combination is applicable also to contexts beyond agriculture.