Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Ecocentre (Project)“

Legal philosophers and environmental activists concerned with transforming the human–Earth relationship typically focus on expanding the community of legal subjects to include the non-human. The limited success of this strategy prompts consideration of an alternative: expanding the concept of the human legal subject to facilitate mutually beneficial human–Earth relations. The abstract character of the rational autonomous individual normalises the pursuit of the individual life project with devastating consequences for the earth. The Cosmic Person introduced here is a Universe-centred, Earth-embedded multi-dimensional self that normalises an interest in the project of life itself.

In a society where anthropocentrism prevails in relation to ecocentrism, it is important to focus on didactic strategies that lead to the change of attitudes toward an ecocentric vision of the world. The Rivers Project is an Iberian project of public participation in action in our country for 12 years and uses an effective methodology for changing environmental attitudes in children in the first years of schooling. The present study aimed to assess the influence of the Rivers Project on the change of anthropocentric vision for an ecocentric vision in children of the primary school. For this, a questionnaire with open and closed questions was applied to two groups of the 4th year of primary school in the city of Bragança, namely a focus group (121 students) and a control group (33 students). The questionnaire was applied to the focus group before and after an educational intervention (pre and post-test), namely two field trips within the Rivers Project, and the control group in the same time periods, with students who did not make this field trips to the river. The question concerning the purpose of this communication was the drawing up of a drawing that mirrored its representation of a river and its banks. The resulting drawings were analyzed and categorized and were subsequently checked for statistically significant changes through the Wilcoxon test between pre and post-test in both groups. The results show that changes occurred in the focal group. The majority of the children went from an anthropocentric vision to an ecocentric vision after leaving the Rivers Project, thus evidencing the effectiveness of this Project in changing environmental attitudes.

In a decolonial determination to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, political ontologies and posthuman legalities in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces as inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse. After years of Indigenous struggles, new social movement mobilizations and citizen activism, twenty-first-century constitutional changes in the region have affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region’s polities. Drawing upon extensive interdisciplinary ethnographic research in Ecuador and Colombia, the article illustrates how Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities express multispecies relations of care and conviviality in opposition to modern extractivist development through the concept of buen vivir. These grassroots collective life projects and life plans articulate rights ‘from below’ to support new practices of territorialization that further materialize natures’ rights and community ideals. Although human rights have modern origins, the implementation of third generation collective biocultural rights to fulfill natures’ rights may help to materially realize community norms, autonomies and responsibilities that exceed modern ontologies. The ecocentric territorial rights struggles and posthuman legalities we explore are examples of a larger emergent project of decolonizing human rights in a politics appropriate to the Anthropocene.

In 2014, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Protection of the Territory and the Sea (MATTM) launched the “Environmental Accounting in the Marine Protected Areas” (EAMPA) project, which proposed a new accounting model for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The model foresaw the integration of ecological and economic components in classical accounting schemes through the quantification of stock and flows embracing both the perspectives. The project, which ended in 2019, allowed the testing and the realization of the multidisciplinary framework. Later, in the context of the EU Interreg “Integrated management of ecological networks through parks and marine areas” (GIREPAM) project, an upgraded version of the EAMPA framework was developed, including additional but fundamental components leading to a more detailed and complete assessment as well as a better theoretical definition. The definitive management framework is outlined through the creation of the two parallel paths, but it provides as a final result three balances from the strong sustainability perspective: ecocentric, anthropocentric and integrated. To ensure that sustainability is obtained, all the three balances must guarantee a positive net benefit for humans and nature alike.

Two views of Human-Nature relation can be found: anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. In order to understand how school textbooks refer to the human’s position in nature we analysed how “Human as guest versus Humans as owners of nature” is present in the three topics of environmental education—Ecosystems, Pollution, and Use of Resource—in textbooks of 14 countries from Europe, Africa, and Middle East. A specific grid of analysis, which was constructed in the context of the European Project BIOHEAD-CITIZEN, was used in this study. Results show that this axis of analysis is present in the majority of textbooks addressing the above three topics but not in the “Biodiversity” topic. Textbooks for 12–15-year old pupils were the ones having more occurrences than those for 6–11- or 16–18-year olds. The textbooks present mainly an ecocentric position, whereas the aesthetic, ethical, and cultural aspects are limited and inadequate, limiting the full perspective of education for sustainable development.

Although extreme-sport athletes’ experiences have been explored in sport psychology, more research is needed to understand the nuanced identity meanings for these athletes in the context of health and well-being. A case-study approach grounded in narrative inquiry was used to explore identity meanings of 1 elite extreme-sport athlete (i.e., skyrunner Kilian Jornet) in relation to well-being. Data gleaned from 4 documentary films and 10 autobiographical book chapters describing the Summits of My Life project were subjected to a thematic narrative analysis. Two intersecting narratives—discovery and relational—threaded the summits project and were used by Jornet to construct an “ecocentric” identity intertwined with nature in fluid ways, depending on 3 relationships related to well-being: the death of climbing partner Stéphane Brosse, team members’ shared values, and her relationship with partner Emelie Forsberg. An expansion of identity, health, and well-being research on extreme-sport athletes beyond simplistic portrayals of them as pathological risk takers and/or motivated by personality traits was gained from these findings.

In September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 goals and 169 targets for sustainable development until 2030. The fourth goal provides for the development of inclusive and equitable quality education, and goals 12, 13 and 14 are aimed at protecting the environment and organizing appropriate education for this. When implementing environmental education, it is necessary to take into account the characteristics of a generation of students, in this case, generation Z. For a number of years, Russian-Finnish projects were carried out in the Luga district of the Leningrad region. One of the main objectives of the projects concerned the environmental education of schoolchildren and students. Using international experience, a number of interactive teaching methods have been developed and are still being used. They are focused on fostering student independence and provide his motivation. A student conducts his own research work and participates in a youth team to prepare and to implement their own projects aimed at solving local problems. This approach forms an ecological culture of an ecocentric type among students, and their desire to bear their part of responsibility for the state of the environment.

In the Amazonian Indigenous context, despite the violent impact of colonization, the understanding that humans are an equal part of all life systems has enjoyed a long uninterrupted history from which we have much to learn at this time of global eco-crisis. At the example of several video works and the co-creation of an Indigenous university in Colombia, this text introduces a new charismatic signifying figure, the Indigenous Scientist, who has the capacity of merging the contradictions of being at once scientific and political actor, studying the natural world while being part of it. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of knowing the world, these forest projects take an ecocentric position in search for the intelligence of nature. The artistic research also highlights new genetic technologies that have been practiced by indigenous medics for time immemorial, allowing them to interact with the cellular energy fields on the molecular level of DNA.

Northeastern Peru is considered a global conservation priority due to high biodiversity and acute threats to natural habitat. Its non-indigenous migrant populations, known as campesinos, are presented by mainstream conservation agents as the major threat to this area, as environmentally destructive, apathetic to nature, and only responsive to economic and material incentives. But the campesinos of Northeastern Peru often initiate their own conservation projects, justifying these actions with moral rationales. I divided these into anthropocentric and ecocentric categories. Justifications included an appreciation of nature's intrinsic values, religious or spiritual value, an aspiration for sustainability and a concern for future generations. I found that conservation is also seen as part of the struggle for social justice and recognition. Monetary incentives promoted by mainstream conservation agents were generally perceived in three ways: 1) as an opportunity for personal economic gain; 2) as an opportunity to sustain otherwise unaffordable conservation activities; 3) and when conservation was part of a social struggle economic incentives were perceived as unnecessary, undesirable or even a hindrance. Governmental legislation and outside conservation agents generally remain biased towards using economic justifications for local initiatives. I used social methodologies to record campesino justifications for conservation and their interactions with conventional conservation. My aim was to categorize and analyze campesino views on conservation, highlighting those which challenge mainstream conservation, political ecologists' paradigms, and those that offer alternatives for collaboration with local populations towards shared goals.Keywords: Conservation, environmental ethics, Peru, ecocentrism, anthropocentrism, neoliberal conservation, local participation.

During the 2001–02 academic year, I lived in China, teaching U.S. civil rights law and helping to start a labor law clinic. My first day of teaching the fall civil rights course was the day of the September 11 attacks, and that event and reactions to it played a dominant role in my experience of that year. However, it was also a particularly interesting year to be in China from an environmental-energy perspective because the Three Gorges Dam was in the process of being built and brought onlie. At that point, the area was partially flooded and it was one of the last years that one could take a standard boat ride through the area. I took a Chinese cruise ship to look at the site—quite an experience that included an almost non-stop speaker directing my daily activities—and also visited the Three Gorges Dam tourist center and a resettled village. I had a number of quiet conversations with people in that village about how the project was affecting their lives. The Three Gorges Dam provides a particularly dramatic example of the complex value choices at the environment-energy interface that are the focus of this essay. In the panel discussion from which this essay emerges, we were asked to assess anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric values at the environment-health interface. However, in the context of the dam, the value conflicts are not found so much in the comparative valuation of humans, species, and ecosystems, but rather in the difficult choices among energy sources that have significant benefits and externalities.

In questo saggio si svolgerà una comparazione dei tre brevi romanzi di Calvino La formica argentina (1952), La nuvola di smog (1958), La speculazione edilizia (1957), con le opere di Malerba in cui maggiormente emerge il suo impegno ecologico: Il serpente (1966), Salto mortale (1968) e Fantasmi romani (2006). Tra questi romanzi che trattano con nerbo la tematica etico-ambientale, esiste un dialogo molto forte a livello testuale e ideologico, certamente maturato dall’amicizia e dagli scambi tra i due autori. Malerba e Calvino, uomini di città cresciuti però in stretto rapporto con la campagna, si rivelano attenti osservatori dei mutamenti economici, antropologici e ambientali che l’Italia subiva nell’epoca del boom. Lontana da qualsiasi lirismo romantico e da sentimenti nostalgici per un mitico passato, la relazione tra letteratura e ambiente affiora nei testi come una forma di denuncia ecologica contro inquinamento, speculazione edilizia e sottomissione degli organismi non-umani. Sia Malerba sia Calvino si fanno portavoce della necessità di smascherare le ideologie dominanti e boicottare le logiche binarie come natura / cultura. Nella battaglia che inscenano tra umano e non-umano emerge la loro prospettiva “ecocentrica” che attribuisce un valore intrinseco ad ogni organismo vivente e al loro spazio naturale a prescindere dalla loro utilità e profitto per l’essere umano. Abstract This essay compares Italo Calvino’s short novels La Formica Argentina (1952), La Nuvola di Smog (1958), and La Speculazione Edilizia (1957), with Luigi Malerba’s works, in which his strong environmental consciousness most comes to light: Il Serpente (1966), Salto Mortale (1968) and Fantasmi Romani (2006). These works engage in a textual and ideological “ecocentric” dialogue about the environment and society, which was certainly the result of the close friendship and professional exchanges between the two authors. This project thus participates in ecocriticism through an investigation of the textual and ideological dialogue between these texts. Rather than merely romantic lyricism and feelings of nostalgia for the mythical past, the relationship between literature and the environment emerges in the texts as a form of ecological denunciation against pollution, building development, and the subjugation of non-human organisms. Malerba and Calvino, city men who spent their upbringing in close contact with nature, reveal themselves to be attentive observers of the economical, anthropological, and environmental changes that Italy underwent in the period known as the economic boom. Both Malerba and Calvino bring to the fore the urgency to unmask dominant ideologies and to boycott perceived binary oppositions of nature versus culture. Through these texts, they stage a battle between the human and non-human, bringing together their “ecocentric” perspective with their goal of bestowing an intrinsic value to every living organism and their natural space. Resumen Este ensayo compara tres novelas cortas de Italo Calvino La formica argentina (1952), La nuvola di smog (1958), La speculazione edilizia (1957), con las obras de Luigi Malerba, en las que más manifiesta su empeño ecológico: Il serpente (1966), Salto mortale (1968) e Fantasmi romani (2006). Entre estas novelas, que tratan con vigor la temática ético-medioambientalista, existe un diálogo muy fuerte a un nivel textual e ideológico, ciertamente madurado desde la amistad y los intercambios entre los dos autores. Malerba y Calvino, hombres de ciudad pero que crecieron en cercano contacto con la naturaleza, se revelan cuidadosos observadores de los mutaciones económicas, antropológicas y medioambientales que el Italia sufría en la época del boom de los años cincuenta y sesenta. Lejana de cualquier lirismo romántico y de sentimientos nostálgicos por un pasado mítico, la relación entre literatura y medio ambiente aparece en los textos como una forma de denuncia ecológica contra la contaminación, la especulación edil y la sumisión de los organismos no-humanos. Tanto Malerba como Calvino devienen portavoces de la necesitad de desenmascarar las ideologías dominantes y boicotear las lógicas binarias como naturaleza / cultura. En la lucha que escenifican entre el humano y no-humano emerge su perspectiva “ecocéntrica” que atribuye un valor intrínseco a cada organismo viviente y a su espacio natural sin importar los beneficios económicos.

Materials are deeply connected with the environment, because they stem from raw materials extracted from the geosphere, rely on large amounts of energy and of water in their production stage, project emissions to air, water and soil when their ores (or minerals) are mined, when they are made in steel mills or cement kilns, including very significant amounts of greenhouse gases. They also contribute to emissions and energy consumption of the artifacts of which they are part, either consumption or investment goods. Their connection with the biosphere raises many issues, in terms of toxicology, ecotoxicology or biodiversity or simply of public health or in the working place. Materials, as an essential part of the anthroposphere, interact deeply with the anthroposphere itself but also with the biosphere, the geosphere, the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, thus with nature in a general way through mechanisms which can no longer simply be described at the margin, as resource depletion or as pollution. This raises issues related to the sustainability of materials in human activities, in which they are deeply immersed and entangled. The standard way of dealing with these environmental issues is to invoke sustainability and to explain that all actors are engaged in sustainable development, a morals or an ethics that points in which direction to go: all players in the materials field, industry, institutions and research, claim allegiance to sustainable development. At a more technical level, specific tools like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are used extensively to measure the interaction of materials with the environment. This, however, is not enough to deal properly with the environmental issues of materials, because these issues are not marginal any longer: the anthroposphere has become so large with respect to the biosphere, the geosphere and the planet in general that environmental risk is now part of modern life, especially in connection with climate change and the loss of biodiversity. To go deeper in analyzing the connection of human activities with nature, it is therefore necessary to reach out to SSH (Social Science and Humanities) disciplines and particularly to environmental ethics. This is a prerequisite for materials scientists (and others) to act decisively in the future in the face of the danger that lies ahead of us. The present paper reviews the advances of environmental ethics, a fairly young discipline born in the 1970s, in as far as it can help all actors on the world anthropospheric theater choose their lines for the future in a more conscious and sophisticated way than simply claiming obedience to sustainability. We will review briefly intellectual forerunners of the discipline like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri David Thoreau, Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich. This will help flesh out well-known concepts like the precautionary principle or the “polluter-pays” principle, which are invoked in creating new materials or new processes to keep pollution and health issues under control, as part of the constraints of professional ethics but also of environmental law. It will be necessary to question to whom or to what the key concept of intrinsic value is attached: people, all living organisms or ecosystems, i.e. the environment in general, and thus to define anthropocentrism, biocentrism and ecocentrism. Environmental law and the ethics of sustainable development are still mainly anthropocentric while scientific ecology is more clearly ecocentric. To tackle the challenges of environmental issues as they are posed today and to avoid catastrophes, it might be necessary in the future for all social players and for people of the world of materials to follow the steps of environmental ethics and to move up from anthropocentrism to the broader vision of ecocentrism.

This Thematic Issue seeks to explore critical perspectives of an international nature on social innovation (SI), social enterprise (SE) and/or social solidarity economy (SSE). The aim is to examine the grand narrative, explore the ontological assumptions of the field, challenge the normative and present alternatives that draw attention to political economy, critical theory and critical management studies.Critical perspectives emerged in social innovation (SI) literature as a concerted effort sometime in 2008. A few voices sounded from the edges of the field much earlier. Ash Amin, Professor of Geography at Durham University, inspected the new favourite of public policy way back in 2002, discarded it as a “a poor substitute for a welfare state” and never returned to the subject. There were heated debates that challenged the grand narrative of SI at the International Social Innovation Research Conferences (ISIRC) (once called the Social Enterprise Research Conference before becoming ISIRC with the involvement of the social innovation theme from Skoll Centre). The Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN) conferences picked away at the promise of unlimited performance and achievement of the upstart SE in a mature voluntary and charity network (Aiken, 2002, 2006, 2007; Grenier, 2009; Pharaoh, Scott & Fisher, 2004). Still, on the whole, the literature in the last twenty years has been overwhelmingly interested in promoting social enterprise (SE) and SI as (a) an inherently good thing, (b) a solution to all problems and (c) a politically neutral complement to neo-liberal economics globally.Through 2005-2008, a handful of academics were beginning to make concerted inroads from within the SE field that challenged the superpowers gifted to the SE/SI rhetoric. First through conference presentations, in particular in 2006, a 1-day seminar at Manchester Metropolitan University, ‘Critical Perspectives on Social Enterprise’, followed by a Special Issue in International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research (Bull, 2008). Later individual publications developed the critical themes in different directions (Seanor et al., 2013; Curtis, 2008; Curtis et al., 2010; Grant, 2008; Scott-Cato et al., 2008; Scott & Hillier, 2010; Jones et al., 2008a, Betta et al., 2010; Bull & Ridley-Duff, 2019; Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2021), each skirting around the issue of critical theory and focussing on finding the ‘social’ in SE, but not addressing critical theory head-on.Then at the 2010 Skoll Centre Research Colloquium on Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School, Oxford, Pascal Dey of University Applied Science, Northwestern, Switzerland burst on to the scene, wowing the gathered crowd with the lucidity of his paper (Dey, 2010), on the symbolic violence in social entrepreneurship discourse. Critical theory had come of age, moving away from the functional critiques (SEs don’t do what they claim) and territorial debates (SEs are businesses in disguise or charities do this anyway) to a more theoretically informed investigation, deliberately working from and with critical theory. Steyaert and Dey (2010) followed this up, in the first edition of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, with a mature call to keep social enterprise research ‘dangerous’.Since then, critical perspectives on SI have widened and diversified with critical perspectives tracks in EMES International Research Network, ISIRC and other SI related conferences as well as an increasing number of PhD and early career researchers adopting a critical lens in studying SI’. Whilst ‘ordinary’ critical thinking might be described as an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one's experiences (Glaser 1941). However, the critical perspectives we are seeking to develop in this Thematic Issue are best described by Horkheimer (1982), whereby we question the facts which our senses present to us as socially performed approaches to understanding in the social sciences. We should start with an understanding of a "social" experience itself as always fashioned by ideas that are in the researchers themselves. The project of a critical perspective is also “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, p244), not merely to describe the functions of those circumstances.Until the late nineteenth century, SI was understood to be subversive of the social order (Sargant, 1858), but in the French milieu was a ‘happy innovation’ of social progress (Comte 1841). What seems to have occurred in the research and publications in critical perspectives on social innovation over the last decade is as threefold engagement with epistemological issues, a drawing on theoretical insights from popular critical theory thinkers and challenges to normative methodological strategies in research. However, there seems to be a dearth of challenges to ontological assumptions (Hu 2018, Hu et al. 2019). By epistemological questions, we mean the question ‘what is the ‘social’ in social enterprise?’, considering (as the rest of this journal does) social is not just a modifier of innovation, but innovation and enterprise as a modifier of the social (Arthur et al., 2006, Bull & Ridley-Duff, 2019). In terms of engagement with critical theorists and challenges to normative research, there is research, for example, on Bourdieu (Teasdale et al., 2012); Giddens (Nicholls & Cho, 2006); Foucault (Curtis, 2007); Polanyi (Bull & Ridley-Duff, 2019; Roy & Grant, 2020; Thompson et al., 2020) and Ostrom (Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2021; Peredo et al., 2020) that offers avenues for development. Likewise, a convergence on the notion of SI as social bricolage (Di Domenico et al., 2010) represents a post-modern turn rather than a critical turn that could offer new avenues of exploration. In methodological terms, more social constructivist/revisionist work is needed too, for example, Froggett and Chamberlayne (2004). There are other critical perspectives that have a few researchers labouring in small groups. In political economy, there are Marxist, green and communitarian perspectives (Yıldırım & Tuncalp, 2016; Scott-Cato, 2008; Scott & Hillier, 2010; Ridley-Duff, 2007). There is a small feminist literature exploring immaterial and affective labour (Jones et al., 2008b; Teasdale et al., 2011), and some in queer theory- exploring transgressions and deviance, such as Grenier (2010) and Dey and Teasdale (2013). There are even fewer working in the post-colonialist space, including Green Nyoni (2016) and Watkins (2017).This Thematic Issue seeks to revisit, review and revivify the emancipatory and critical project proposed by the founder of this journal, Benoît Godin. To this end, this Thematic Issue of NOvation invited submissions with a particular focus on the critical perspectives on social innovation, social enterprise and the social solidarity economy (SSE), to promote new and emerging perspectives.The five articles presented in this Thematic Issue explore critical perspectives on SI, SE & SSE. The first paper by the Guest Editors themselves, Curtis, Bull and Nowak, outlines the rising tide of criticality in SI research. They present three waves of research in the field to date. The first wave of criticality in SI/SE research they present outlines critiques of the ‘social’ in social enterprise research, that sought to challenge the pro-business and celebrity-like status given to SE. The second wave highlights a post structuralist shift where research challenged the theoretical underpinnings of SI/SE research. The third wave they suggest constitutes a dangerous threat to the left’s political appreciation of this movement. Where wave two sought to open and welcome opinions that challenged the ontology and epistemological foundations of thought, the third wave has the potential for right-wing co-option. They therefore call for a more forensic conceptualisation on what is ‘good’, ‘ethical’ and ‘social’ about SI/SE, with this threat to the cultural hegemony, subverting and changing intellectual emancipation of the field. The second paper by Pel, Wittmayer, Avelino and Bauler picks up on critical issues by detailing the intrinsic and pervasive paradoxes of transformative SI (TSI) and offering researchers concrete strategies to account for them. The authors identify three core paradoxes of social innovation: system reproduction, temporality and reality construction. System reproduction is encountered where SI both challenges and reproduces the existing social order. The paradox of time draws attention to how the same SI can be considered new and old – varying across different points in time and contexts. Reality construction paradoxes occur as SI exists both as concrete activity and as a projection/interpretation, with researchers engaged in shaping and co-producing SI phenomena. Blending their extensive research experience and empirical examples from the literature the authors demonstrate how these paradoxes are integral to TSI phenomena and point to how methodological clarity is necessary to properly understand them. This leads to suggestions of clear research strategies that will support SI researchers in navigating each of these paradoxes.The third paper from Sardo, Callegari and Misganaw examines the ‘social’ in current social innovation and entrepreneurship studies and how it has been appropriated. Following their literature review of 18 leading innovation and entrepreneurship journals, they identify four categories: the disciplinary and integrationist approaches are where the social is integrated in existing dominant framework and discourse; the separationist approach is a critique of self-interest and provides ideas of altruism, lifestyle and democracy dimensions considering the context specific nature of the ‘social’; finally, the essentialist approach they discuss as arguments for the social nature of innovation and entrepreneurship to be integrated into the mainstream, bringing ecosystems and the socially constructed nature of innovation and entrepreneurship to the fore. They call for a more substantial integration of the social dimension in critical studies yet warn that tensions on extending into separationist and essentialist avenues cannot be reconciled with existing linear developments.The fourth paper from Curtis presents a critical realist and systems analysis approach, using Checkland’s soft systems methodology to empirical research. The paper uses evidence from a research study of community policing and the adoption of a specifically designed handbook to assist social innovators to implement locally identified solutions and practices (context mechanism outcome chains) that makes the case that SI is more than social bricolage and not a mysterious craft of innovation, but instead a systematic and replicable process.The final and fifth paper from Ergun and Begum explores the nexus between SI and the environment. Their paper challenges the narrative of United Nations Development Programmes through an eco-critical discourse analysis (ECDA) lens of fourteen UN publications. They suggest the dominance of an anthropocentric perspective, where neoliberalism resides is commonplace in these publications. They state it is not until we change to an ecocentric discourse that we will align at one with nature and redress the socio-economic problems of the world.We hope this Thematic Issue raises some interest and some thought-provoking conversations in the future. Many thanks to the reviewers, the authors and above all the editors of NOvation, for trusting us with this Thematic Issue! We hope scholars enjoy the edition as much as we have in bringing this together.

The analysis of Environmental Impact Assessments (Amdal) in project plans and/or activities has been considered crucial to anticipate environmental pollution and damage within the environmental legal system regulated by Indonesia’s Environmental Law. Amdal serves as a tool for communities to challenge various development projects that pose threats to their environment. However, the government has recently sought to narrow the space for public participation and the functions of Amdal, as evident in Presidential Regulation No. 2 of 2022 on Job Creation. This normative legal research aims to examine the urgency and concept of Amdal from a green constitution perspective. The study reveals that, from the green constitution perspective, the existence of Amdal with broad participation is essential. Instead of restricting it only to affected communities, as outlined in Presidential Regulation No. 2 of 2022 on Job Creation, participation in the preparation, submission of objections, and assessment of Amdal documents, according to the green constitution perspective, should be expanded not only to the general public but also to non-human entities, such as rivers, mountains, land, flora-fauna, and others. This study is expected to contribute to the revitalization of an ecocentric Amdal concept in line with green constitution principles, supporting efforts toward more ecocentric environmental protection. In a broader vision, this study is anticipated to contribute to the transformation of environmental law and the constitution to be more responsive to social-ecological justice.

PurposeThis research aims at examining public parks as a complex, interrelated system in which a public park’s natural system and its man-made system can work together within an ecocentric approach. It will create a framework that can support the design and management of public parks.Design/methodology/approachThe article first introduces previous research and justifies the need for a new approach. It then uses conceptual analysis to examine the concepts that construct a park’s system through previous theoretical research. Finally, the public park system is constructed by synthesising its components and showing the interrelations between them. These components are defined based on previous theoretical and empirical research.FindingsA public park system is defined as consisting of a natural system and a man-made system with multiple components that interact to offer the overall experience in a park. The defined system can be a useful tool for decision-makers, managers and designers in the analysis and evaluation of existing and potential projects to achieve multifunctional parks that are better utilised and have a wider influence.Originality/valueThe research offers an alternative approach for framing public parks that do not deal with their components in isolation from each other. This view of public parks brings together perspectives from different literature into one coherent framework that emphasises mutual dependencies and interactions in one integrated whole.

Environmental ethics deals with discussing the ethical framework of environmental values, their organization and regulation, and their ethical premises. One of the main cul-de-sacs that environmental ethics has is its anthropocentrism that can be observed through its diverse ethical approaches—even ecocentric ones, developed as non-anthropocentric egalitarian alternatives. This article aims to question the exclusiveness of Anthropos, the practices, values, and discourses that determine the scope and course of environmental ethics, and the exclusion of nonhuman animals or more-than human beings from its focus. It first examines the main approaches in environmental ethics (land ethic, deep ecology, social ecology, and postmodern environmental ethics)—biocentric, ecocentric, anthropocentric, socialist, postmodern—and reveals that they are but limited to the human perspective, deeply rooted in human exceptionalism. All of these approaches provide us with a critical frame that still needs to be deconstructed so that they will not project an anthropocentric orientation. This article posits that the compass of environmental ethics, recently aligning itself to embrace the more-than-human world in its ecocentric attitude, still needs to be revisited for its discourses of exclusion. At this point, new materialism functions as a prolific theoretical site as it diminishes the classical boundaries between human and animal or subject and object that anthropocentric environmental ethics relies on. With such concepts as “agential realism” (Barad), “transcorporeal ethics” (Alaimo), “vibrant matter” (Bennett), or “storied matter” (Oppermann and Iovino) the new materialist view of the human and the nonhuman evolves to end set dualities in the discourses of environmental ethics. This article concludes that the new materialist theory destabilizes any anthropocentric position in environmental ethics and includes more-than-human beings in its ethical focus, discarding any dualities that serve anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism.

AbstractThis paper reflects on leadership shown in Venda, Southern Africa to protect the lungs of the planet and draws out key themes on the way Indigenous wisdom — underpinned by a sense of the sacred and the profane – expressed in solidarity with nature - are vital for protecting forests. It explores indigenous wisdom on their kinship with organic and inorganic sacred totems (plants, animals and features of the landscape) which are protected through relationships that inform governance. The ongoing community of practice and related projects make a case for standing together to address climate change. The paper was developed as part of a University of South Africa project together with the named authors. Mphatheleni Makaulule has developed an a priori and a posteriori approach to Ecosystemic governance that resonates with the work of Wangari Maathai. Makaulule’s leadership in Venda that is discussed with fellow project members who are exploring how the agendas for COP 26 could be attained by fostering law informed by Bateson’s concept an “ecology of mind – which means an understanding of human beings’ place within living systems and our need for both education and laws to protect ecosystems such as forests (which are the lungs of the world) and the water systems (which are the life blood of all living systems). The governance approach in Venda emphasised the need to think in terms of our relationships with all living systems. The idea of extending a sense of solidarity to others is explored deeply with Makaulule and colleagues by considering similar approaches in other places, such as the Amazon where Makaulule spent time learning from shamanic leaders, Ghana (where Akwasi Achemfuor has undertaken research), Northern Territory and South Australia (where McIntyre was mentored by Peter Turner and Olive Veverbrants). The paper also refers to the work of Widianingsih based on an in-depth discussion on the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar community in West Java that has also been protecting the forests for more than 300 years. The authors explore whether attributing personhood to nature, could be regarded as limiting a notion of mystical and pragmatic recognition of interbeing or even a form of colonising the notion of interbeing? We suggest that a community of practice approach (Wenger, 1999, Wenger et al., 2009) to support learning organisations and communities could support two-way education to enable cross cultural, cross disciplinary and transnational learning to support steps towards wellbeing through sharing our understanding of interbeing in dialogue, it became clear that transcendence through totemism, dreams and shamanistic rituals support a sense of oneness with nature, relationality as well as a sense of awe, solidarity and responsibility for others which is being increasingly recognised in the arts and sciences.

Along with the increasing awareness about the destructive force of humankind on nature, existential questions about how to create a more sustainable relationship with the natural world have emerged. To acquire a more eco‐friendly attitude, we need to go beyond the well‐established knowledge cultures that highlight a nature versus culture dichotomy. This study focuses on bio art as an epistemic vehicle to re‐imagine our understanding of and connection to the natural world. Drawing on the theoretical stance of philosophical posthumanism, we discuss how artistic co‐creation processes involving humans and other‐than‐humans hold the potential to introduce a shift in our worldview from anthropocentric to ecocentric. We further question what this shift might imply for how we approach the complex relationship between humans and other‐than‐humans in our own research. We conducted a within‐case and cross‐case analysis of five bio art projects that previously won the Bio Art & Design Award (2018–2020). To analyze the data, we used a combined approach of visual and context analysis and material semiotics. Qualitative interviews were used as a data collection technique to investigate the lived experiences of both artists and scientists involved in the projects. Our findings suggest that bio art’s epistemic significance can primarily be found in its multispecies perspective: By following the wills and ways of bio‐organisms, bio art makes the invisible connection between nature and culture visible. Bio art can provoke our thinking about how to include and approach other‐than‐human agency in the context of socially engaged research practices.