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

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:

• an amenity green space
• a regenerative farm
• a landscape restoration project

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

Working collaboratively and emphasising co-production of knowledge throughout, the team will deliver several key outputs on socioecological care including:

• a publicly available toolkit on socioecological care for communities and decision-making
• three illustrative case studies
• and exploration of socioecological care through newly composed Scottish music

We will deepen academic scholarship of care and its uptake alongside increasing confidence, knowledge and skills in communities to engage with environmental sustainability through socioecological care.

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.

Acknowledgement