A new socio-ecological norm: Can taking responsibility for ES be transformative?

Background/Question/Methods: The degradation of ecosystem services has tremendous impacts on human well-being across the world, much of which can be attributed to global markets and associated supply chains. As the previous speakers reveal, there are exciting new initiatives in NGOs and corporations to mitigate the impacts of diverse human activities on ecosystem services. But such efforts currently only amount to a tiny fraction of the impacts experienced worldwide. Therefore, it’s worth considering what might be needed to leverage existing efforts to ripple out such that such mitigation transforms from the exception to the norm. In this talk, I root such an analysis in consolidated insights from the cognitive science and organizational change literatures.

Results/Conclusions: This analysis of opportunities for transformative change reveals that there are crucial roles for both the academic and non-profit communities to play in engaging the private sector. These roles include three categories, connecting with people emotionally (e.g., documenting the real, tragic human consequences of ES degradation, linking ES stewardship to identity) and rationally (e.g., identifying what would constitute success and some specific tangible steps to initiate the process), and engineering a fostering corporate/social environment (e.g., providing limited choice-sets that enable the intended actions and resulting positive feedback from consumers and advocates, leveraging existing efforts to visibly celebrate success and apply peer pressure to others).

Each of these steps is feasible, but several require that academics and NGOs play roles that they have traditionally resisted, including brokering widespread agreement across sectors and organizations. With such high stakes, will those needed rise to the occasion?