Organiser's description (via the Oxford Biodiversity Network):
Achieving pressing climate and biodiversity goals demands more than just technological and scientific innovation – it requires deep social, cultural, and political change. However, environmental challenges are often framed as technological and scientific ‘fixes’ that overlook these critical social dimensions, sidelining alternative knowledges and solutions. Ultimately, strengthening connections between people and nature must be at the heart of solutions to the biodiversity and climate crisis. This makes the social sciences – including geography, anthropology, history, arts, psychology, sociology, politics, and economics – vital for opening up alternative perspectives, pathways, and possibilities that foster justice and well-being for both humans and nature. This seminar will explore how integrating social sciences, alongside ecological and technological approaches, can stimulate new ways of understanding environmental challenges and develop more genuinely transformative solutions and real-world impact.
This panel brings together social science experts from a range of disciplines – Professor Patrick Devine-Wright (University of Exeter), Dr Beth Brockett (Forest Research), Professor Karen Jones (University of Kent), and Dr Eric Kumeh (University of Oxford) – to explore how more impactful, integrated and collaborative approaches are vital for tackling the poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity decline, inequality and well-being issues. Drawing on their UK-based and internationally significant research spanning academia, policy, and practice, the panellists will discuss how the social sciences can open up new ways of thinking and innovative solutions to achieving transformative change in ways that are equitable and socially ‘just’. This includes championing inter- and transdisciplinary, more-than-human, and equitable approaches that embrace diverse forms of Indigenous, community-led, and place-based science and expertise.
Following a brief opening talk by Dr Constance McDermott, the seminar will feature short presentations by each panelist before opening up to an interactive discussion between the panel and the audience, led by Professor Michael Winter OBE. The event is being organised and co-facilitated by Dr Caitlin Hafferty.
Biographies
Professor Patrick Devine-Wright
Patrick Devine-Wright's research has been ranked in the world's top 1% of social science according to citation of publications in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. With expertise spanning Human Geography and Environmental Psychology, he conducts theoretically-driven research with real-world implications, often in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary settings. Active across local, national and international contexts, he is engaged in efforts to ensure social science insights inform decision making on a range of environmental challenges, notably climate change.
Patrick is Director of the £6.25m ACCESS (Advancing Capacity in Climate and Environment Social Science) leadership team for environmental social science funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Until 2027, ACCESS will work to increase the co-ordination and visibility of social science research through outreach and close relationships with stakeholders and policy makers across the UK and internationally.
Professor Karen Jones
Karen Jones is an environmental historian/historical geographer with an interest in species, spaces and stories. She has worked on various geographies and is a specialist on conservation politics and history, settler colonization and its ecological impacts, landscape values and human engagements with a range of critters (especially wolves). She is currently working on human-environmental relations in this country, especially in the areas of parks and urban greening and on the nature and culture of rewilding.
Dr Beth Brockett
Beth Brockett works for Forest Research as a Senior Social Scientist. She is currently leading on research which includes developing a better understanding of community benefits from new tree planting and public values relating to trees outside of woodland. Beth previously worked for Natural England providing evidence for the Environmental Land Management Schemes programme, supporting Natural England in embedding an evidence-led, best-practice engagement organisational culture, and she spent time as the social science lead for the national People and Nature Survey. She has a particular interest in promoting the role of social science within the environmental sector and is involved in the multi-partner ACCESS project. Beth's background is in human geography, ecology and soil science and she considers herself an interdisciplinary specialist. She has also previously worked as a farm conservation adviser, an academic researcher, and as a community development practitioner.
Dr Eric Kumeh
Eric Kumeh is a postdoctoral researcher focused on power and equity in land-use governance. Passionate about land access in rural Africa, questions how multi-level governance of nature recovery influences land-use choices and decisions among marginalized and underserved communities in mosaic landscapes, characterized by diverse and divergent interests, in low-income countries.
Professor Michael Winter OBE
Michael Winter OBE is the Glanely Professor of Agricultural Change at the University of Exeter based jointly in the Centre for Rural Policy Research and the Department of Geography. He was director of the CRPR from 2002 to 2017 and his career as a rural social scientist spans 45 years with numerous research reports, academic publications, and research grants. He has a long track record of policy engagement and has held many board and committee positions and chairmanships at both local and national levels, including being a board member of Natural England for 7 years until 2023 and of Rothamsted Research for nine years until 2023. Currently he chairs Devon Local Nature Partnership and Natural England Social Science Expert Panel.
Dr Constance McDermott
Constance L. McDermott is an Associate Professor and Jackson Senior Fellow at Oriel College and the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), University of Oxford. She is also leader of ECI's Land Society and Governance Programme. Her work spans the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa and addresses the linkages among diverse local, regional and global priorities for land use, forests, and climate mitigation and adaptation. She examines both new and old institutions of land use governance, from market-based initiatives such as forest and carbon certification to sovereign state-based and traditional community-based approaches, to better understand how dynamics of trust and power shape environmental and social policies and facilitate or inhibit desired outcomes. Recent research directions include the study of carbon and natural capital markets, and supply chain policies, such as the EUDR, and their intersection with alternative and community-based approaches.
Dr Caitlin Hafferty
Caitlin Hafferty does research on the governance, politics, and democratic participation aspects of nature recovery and Nature-based Solutions. She conducts transdisciplinary research that is theoretically-informed and has real-world impact, working in collaboration with government, private business, charities, social enterprises, and community organisations, primarily within a UK context. Her current postdoctoral research, funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, explores how nature recovery initiatives can be governed in more participatory and collaborative ways for transformative change towards multiple sustainability objectives, and the impact of private carbon and nature markets in shaping this.
The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.
The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.
