Building Sustainability on a Foundation of Care

A Pilot Study in the Highlands of Scotland

The Project

Environmental decision-making in climate and nature tends to foreground economic, technical and scientific perspectives, knowledges and strategies. Building on Murphy’s (2024) call for a ‘diverse world of caring places’, this project aims to elaborate a socioecological care approach for building better people-planet relations. Care in this sense is an ethical-political position, emphasising relationships and interdependencies, highlighting the importance of everyday caring practices as well dispositional characteristics like love, respect and solidarity. This has transformative potential because a socioecological care approach will foreground marginalised standpoints, draw attention to un/caring actions and how these are linked, the contexts in which care is possible or not, and in/equalities within caring relations (Tronto, 2013).

By bringing together academic social scientists, community-based co-researchers and musicians, our objectives are to:

• co-produce a shared understanding and language of socioecological care that connects social science knowledge with lived experiences in communities
• test qualitative research methods for investigating and expanding socioecological care
  build skills, capacities and confidence in communities around socioecological care in action
• produce three explanatory case studies of socioecological care highlighting related challenges and opportunities
• explore, evolve and promote socioecological care through newly composed Scottish music, involving young people

This work furthers academic scholarship of care and seeks to encourage uptake alongside increasing confidence, knowledge and skills in communities to engage with environmental sustainability through socioecological care.

Methodology

Our methods are underpinned by a commitment to socially engaged research. We focus on three case studies located in Badenoch and Strathspey, Highlands of Scotland that are already, yet differently, engaged in socioecological care:

• Carrbridge Community Orchard
• Lynbreck Croft
• Wildland Ltd

Each case study involves community co-researchers, illustrates different environmental policy agendas and presents opportunities to explore inter-human, inter-species and inter-generational socioecological caring relations.

In January 2025 we held a two-day workshop with our team to share and discuss social science scholarship on ethics of care, how we might apply this to our cases, and how to research care in each case. We were joined by an illustrator, Dennis Sisterson, to capture our conversations.

The fieldwork period was intense and inspiring. As a team we completed 30 interviews, 2 focus groups, 9 field visits, a series of mapping and autoethnographic exercises and 20+ hours of participant observation. This culminated in a second workshop held in May 2025 where preliminary findings from each case study were shared with the wider team.

Guiding Principles

Our research design is guided by Community Based Participatory Research. Co-producing socioecological care with, in and for communities in Badenoch and Strathspey takes seriously our responsibility to aid efforts of decolonisation, repair harms and avoid reinforcing experiences of being subjected to investigation. In addition to the projects’ collaborative development process and outputs and outcomes, all project activities and outputs involve co-production and manifest the ACCESS Guiding Principles.