Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 15:15 - 16:45
PAPER SESSION 8
of sustainability and their discursive manifestations. These in turn play a fundamental role in participatory decisionmaking
processes around social and environmental issues that affect people in the study area. The paper shows how
local people develop and deploy highly culture-specific concepts of sustainability that emphasise the preservation of
place-specific knowledge, practices and folkways. These both shape and reflect citizens' (lack of) engagement with
environmental policy processes and influence their shared social norms regarding possible interactions with 'outside'
experts such as local, national and EU policy-makers.
In contrast, scientists and policy-makers frequently perpetuate sustainability concepts and discourses that reify certain
knowledge dichotomies and that draw on hierarchical concepts of expertise that privilege scientific findings over and
above lay people's insights. As a result, objectified scientific realities are more or less clearly demarcated from local
sustainability thinking, prematurely closing off potentially fruitful avenues for citizen participation in political decisionmaking.
Identifying intersections between expert and lay interpretations of sustainability is thus essential for creating
spaces for meaningful interaction between citizens and policy-makers and for developing shared alternative visions of
sustainability that can guide policy and practice in the future.
Innovating Locally, Transforming Globally: Land Reform in Scotland as an Environmentally Democratic
Imperative in Climate Change Adaptation
Samuel, A.
(Abertay University)
Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, Scotland has witnessed a fundamental change in the way in which we
relate to environmental matters; it is a change which has arguably lead to the creation of National Parks, access
rights, and the community right to buy, and indeed, a further round of 'land reform' measures, currently passing
through the Scottish Parliament. This paper suggests that these changes and in association with them, local land
management mechanisms, have developed as a result of the need for 'adaptation' in the face of failing traditional land
management arrangements in combatting environmental degradation and its effects – global warming – including rural
community sustainability. In as much, it is argued that a variety of innovative and novel land management
arrangements have developed throughout the Country.
In outlining the above, my paper adopts a Bourdieuian perspective in isolating the natural environment as cultural
capital, in opposition to its traditional characterisation as economic capital. It further claims that this recapitalisation
can be associated, albeit in part, with a transforming 'field', itself linked with Devolutionary tendencies, i.e., the Scottish
Parliament and its jurisdiction, as opposed to a UK Parliament and by definition, a UK jurisdiction or 'field', while in
turn, this involves a changing habitus, albeit subconsciously.
In summary, and utilising Geddes' ideas, I claim that we are beginning to see a situation developing in Scotland,
wherein the ability to act locally, as regards, thinking globally, is apparent.
Defining and Measuring Community Resilience to Climate Change: The Case of Flood Risk
Orr, P., Twigger-Ross, C., Brooks, K., Forrest, S.
(Collingwood Environmental Planning)
Definitions and approaches to community resilience to climate change are numerous and diverse with perspectives
emphasising a resistance approach through to those focused on a more transformative approach whereby
communities develop resources and capacities that enable transition towards a low carbon society (taking
responsibility for reducing climate change and preparing for future 'stresses') as well as the ability to live through the
'shocks' of climate change impact such as floods and heatwaves. In this paper we draw on research carried out for
Defra evaluating the Flood Resilience Community Pathfinder (FRCP) scheme in England together with work
commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) examining the evidence and practice around locality and
community resilience to climate change to provide a framework for considering the key elements needed to improve
community resilience to climate change. The paper will discuss how some aspects of the framework have been
developed into community and household resilience indicators within the evaluation of the Defra FRCP project.
Finally, it will consider the extent to which the indicators could be used in the wider context of measuring community
resilience to a range of climate change impacts and in facilitating transitions towards a low carbon society.
291 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University