Cultural Sustainability and the Nature-culture Interface ─ Livelihoods, Policies, and Methodologies

As contemporary socio-ecological challenges such as climate change and biodiversity preservation have become more important, the three pillars concept has increasingly been used in planning and policy circles as a framework for analysis and action. However, the issue of how culture influences sustainability is still an underexplored theme. Understanding how culture can act as a resource to promote sustainability, rather than a barrier, is the key to the development of cultural sustainability.

This book explores the interfaces between nature and culture through the perspective of cultural sustainability. A cultural perspective on environmental sustainability enables a renewal of sustainability discourse and practices across rural and urban landscapes, natural and cultural systems, stressing heterogeneity and complexity. The book focuses on the nature-culture interface conceptualised as a meeting-place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledges meet, are negotiated, discussed and resolved. Rather than looking for lost unities, or an imaginary view of harmonious relationships between humans and nature based in the past, it explores cases of interfaces that are context-sensitive and which consciously convey the problems of scale and time.

While calling attention to a cultural or ‘culturalised’ view of the sustainability debate, this book questions the radical nature-culture dualism dominating positive modern thinking as well as its underlying view of nature as pre-given and independent from human life. As such, it engages with debates on the nature-culture nexus, post-nature, relational ontologies and social nature.

Inger Birkeland is Associate Professor at Department of Culture and Humanities at Telemark University College, Norway, where she is leader of research group on cultural heritage research. She is a member of the work in COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability.

Rob Burton is a research scientist at the Centre for Rural Research in Trondheim, Norway. He focusses on farmer agency and, in particular, the influence of identity and cultural factors on decision-making.

Constanza Parra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, at the University of Leuven. She researches and writes on social sustainability, nature-culture interactions, governance of socio-ecological systems and sustainable tourism.