In this book we have discussed how two subfields of environmental psychology— environmental cognition and assessment—are linked to each other as well as to research in related fields on decision making and action in real-world environments. We hope this discussion will stimulate integration of these heretofore unrelated fields of research. By integration we mean the establishment of a framework that shows how research in the different subfields fits together into some overall view of environmental psychology. Initially a framework of this kind must be established through analyses of existing research. The chapters in this book include such analyses. However, an integrative framework should eventually develop into a theory subject to empirical tests. This final chapter analyzes what bearings the preceding chapters have on the possibility of integration across environmental cognition, assessment, and action. We will do this by discussing a number of obstacles to integration. In doing so, a tentative, integrative framework and an agenda for future research directions are proposed. The basic motivation behind this book is that integration should lead to future, more promising research directions than currently available for understanding human-environment relationships. However, there are other benefits of integration as well. One additional such benefit is its potential value for applications through policy formation, planning, and design. Because applications have been and continue to be important to environmental psychology, a final section of the present chapter comments on this issue. The preceding chapters have revealed a number of potentially significant obstacles to the integration of research on cognition, assessment, and action in real-world environments. The most critical ones are that different researchers prefer different theoretical perspectives, that they, partly as a consequence of that, emphasize different aspects of their respective problems, and that they often prefer research paradigms that may make integration more difficult. A serious obstacle to integration across the different subfields of environmental cognition, assessment, and action is created by the low level of integration even within the subfields. Particularly striking are differences in theoretical perspectives. Such differences have far-reaching consequences because they determine how problems are framed, how hypotheses are formulated, and what research methods are chosen (Gärling & Golledge, 1989; Moore, 1987; Saegert & Winkel, 1990).
Tackling the multi-actor and multi-level complexity of European governance of knowledge: Transnational actors in focus
