The impact of nature-based interventions on public health: a review using pathways, mechanisms and behaviour change techniques from environmental social science and health behaviour change

The aim of this narrative review is to explore whether nature-based interventions improved individual public health outcomes and health behaviours, using a conceptual framework that included pathways and pathway domains, mechanisms, and behaviour change techniques derived from environmental social science theory and health behaviour change models. A two-stage scoping methodology was used to identified studies published between 2000 and 2021. Peer reviewed, English-language reports of nature-based interventions with adults (N = 9) were included if the study met the definition of a health�behaviour change intervention and reported at least one measured physical/mental health outcome. Interventions focused on the restoring or building capacities pathway domains as part of the nature contact/experience pathway; varied health behaviour change mechanisms and techniques were present but environmental social-science-derived mechanisms to influence health outcomes were used less. Practical recommendations for future interventions include explicit statement of the targeted level of causation, as well as utilisation of both environmental social science and health behaviour change theories and varied public health outcomes to allow simultaneously testing of theoretical predictions.

Political ecology and decolonial research: co-production with the Iñupiat in Utqiaġvik

Environmental social science research designs have shifted over the past several decades to include an increased commitment to multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary team-based work that have had dual but complementary foci. These address power and equity in the substantive aspects of research, and also to adopt more engaged forms of practice, including decolonial approaches. The fields of political ecology, human geography, and environmental anthropology have been especially open to converge with indigenous scholarship, particularly decolonial and settler colonial theories and research designs, within dominant human-environmental social science paradigms. Scholars at the forefront of this dialogue highlight the ontological (ways of knowing), epistemological (how we know), and institutional (institutions of higher education) transformations that need to occur in order for this to take place. In this article we contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we highlight the synergies between political ecology and decolonial scholarship, particularly focusing on the power dynamics in research programs and historical legacies of human-environmental relationships, including those of researchers. Second, we explore how decolonial research pushes political ecologists and other environmental social scientists to not only consider adopting international and local standards of working with, by and for Indigenous Peoples within research programs but how this work ultimately extends to research and education within their home institutions and organizations. Through integrating decolonized research practices in the environmental social sciences, we argue that synthesizing multiple knowledge practices and transforming institutional structures will enhance team-based environmental social science work to improve collaboration with Indigenous scientists, subsistence practitioners, agency representatives, and sovereign members of Indigenous communities.Keywords: Alaska; collaboration; co-production; decolonial; Indigenous Knowledges; Iñupiaq Peoples

Environmental Activism

Social science research on environment and activism with a cross- or transnational scope (REACTS) is described as a consolidated but confused, stagnant field of scholarship, one which has yet to surpass the comparable state of international studies at large. Previous reviews of the literature in this growing and interdisciplinary research domain have gone so far as so divide it into either its cross-national or its transnational branch, respectively associated with cross-national and environmental social science (CESS), or transnational and environmental social science (TESS). As evidence of stagnancy, once the CESS and TESS branches of REACTS are combined, changes in the cross-national research agenda have been merely the reverse of the transnational one. From 1969–75, REACTS literature covered the themes of population, catastrophic limits to growth, interstate conferences and organizations, North–South relations, survivalist/lifeboat ethics, resource and land conservation, and the social movement organization/non-governmental organization/"third sector." From 1977–91, the issues covered shifted to emphasize violence/conflict, counter environmentalist backlash, seal hunting, whaling, rural energy (improved bioenergy cookstoves), and possibly baby foods, though the earlier concerns with population, (nature) conservation, interstate conferences and survivalist/lifeboat ethics continued. The resistance literature was considerably consolidated and there was a quantitative change in the attention that environmental activism itself received within the pre-existing orientations. In the post-1992 era, the thematic array of transnational REACTS expanded even further as additional issues made it to the agenda in international and environmental studies.