Redefining community based on place attachment in a connected world

Discussion

Prevailing conceptualizations of community in environmental policy and management, based on residential location or resource use, are limited with respect to their utility as surrogates for communities of shared environment-related interests and, in particular, the localist perspective of community they entail. Given current social and environmental change, particularly increasing connectedness, new approaches to community are critically needed to address contemporary sustainability challenges. We examined an alternative framing for community based on place attachment in the context of the highly threatened GBR. We identified four emergent communities that differed in the strength and nature of their attachment to the GBR and that spanned conventional communities of location and use. In this section, we discuss the four emergent attachment communities, the processes underpinning the formation of each type of attachment, and how this study contributes to advancing theory on place attachment. We then outline how this approach contributes to conceptualizations of community in environmental policy and provide explicit recommendations for how a place attachment framing to community may be used to strengthen public participation and stewardship.

Grouping of respondents in communities of place attachment reveals that people’s bonds to the GBR manifest in four distinct types. Further, the distribution of communities of use and location between attachment communities suggests that multiple processes underpin the formation of those bonds. The Reef Connected community, which has the highest levels of attachment, contains the most commercial fishers and tourism operators and the least tourists of all attachment communities. This finding lends support to traditional perspectives on place attachment, which argue that attachment forms through ongoing direct (i.e., firsthand) experiential and interactive processes that may involve physical and social dimensions (e.g., refs. 32, 33). These processes reflect those that underpin the rationale of use and location framings of community, namely, that commonalities in how individuals use a resource leads to shared environment-related interests and values. Such perspectives on the formation of person–place bonds are further supported by the composition of the least attached community, the Reef Disconnected community, which contains the fewest local respondents and the most individuals residing overseas.

However, contrary to traditional perspectives on place attachment, our results also suggest that ongoing direct experience does not always lead to emotional bonds with place nor is it a prerequisite for the formation of such bonds. For example, more than 30% of commercial fishers in our sample were in the Reef User community, which was characterized by low place identity despite high levels of direct and indirect place dependence. Further, our findings point to additional processes underpinning person–place bonds that, rather than being driven by direct ongoing experience, are facilitated by mobility (including corporeal and that mediated by information and communication technology). The attachment community that is characterized by the second highest levels of place identity and indirect place dependence, the Armchair Enthusiasts, contains the most tourists and national residents, as well as almost 30% of international residents interviewed. This profile suggests that people can form emotional bonds with the GBR and assign instrumental value to it in terms of general well-being goals without ongoing firsthand experience and fulfillment of activity-specific functional goals (which was captured by our direct dependence indicator).

Our study therefore makes two important contributions to advancing the literature on place attachment. First, our study breaks new ground by examining attachment to a particular place among people residing locally, nationally, and internationally. Our results inform recurrent debates as to whether place attachment implies parochialism (10), showing, instead, that it can provide a means to transcend geographic and social boundaries. Second, our inductive approach (based on cluster analysis), which has had little application in the place literature (but ref. 30), revealed several types of attachment facilitated by mobility processes (e.g., Armchair Enthusiasts).

The multiple types of place attachment revealed by our analysis suggest that the nature of place attachment has evolved, whereby people without ongoing direct experience can form bonds with a place. Indeed, it is increasingly recognized that place attachment may form due to cultural and symbolic meanings that are not based only on experiential meanings but also wider sociocultural institutions and identities (34). The GBR is often described as possessing unique “Australianness” (35) and plays an important role in the individual identity of Australians despite their limited direct experience of it (36). The GBR is also of international significance and may resonate with other identities (e.g., tropical person, environmentalist) that are not related to the GBR as a specific place, but rather as a type of place. This form of generalized attachment to place type is suggested to be on the rise as society becomes increasingly mobile and connected across spatial scales (9, 34) and the factors influencing identity shift from “roots” in place to “routes” of expression (37). In other words, conceptualization of attachment has evolved from the emphasis on a single long-term place of residence to places being “meaningful as expressions of a person’s individual trajectory and identity” (ref. 10, p. 39).

Our results challenge prevailing approaches to framing community in environmental policy and management, and suggest that categorization of stakeholders needs to go beyond location and use to also consider the nature of individuals’ attachment to place. Our findings, specifically that communities framed by location or use were highly heterogeneous in terms of individuals’ bonds to the GBR and that nonlocal stakeholders can form emotional and instrumental bonds with the GBR, support the localist critique of conventional conceptualizations of community, as well as the concern that these framings of community are ill-suited as proxies for groups with shared environment-related interests. Nevertheless, we are not advocating that use and location framings of community be abandoned. Indeed, these types of community are integral to on-ground management of proximate drivers (e.g., fishing, tourism, pollution) and will continue to be important entry points for public participation also because they are easily identifiable and often form political units. Rather, we suggest, together with current community scholars (5), that the multiple forms of community that are constituted across the varying ways in which people and nature relate are relevant to environmental policy. More specifically, we posit that managers and policymakers may simultaneously draw on use, location, and attachment framings of community, and that the role of each framing will depend on the purpose and nature of the public participation initiative.

The concept of communities of place attachment outlined here contributes to advancing theory on community in environmental policy, and may aid policymakers and managers in public participation and fostering environmental stewardship in three ways. First, directly ascertaining and accounting for communities of attachment may help managers understand and respond to the intangible, but supremely important, emotional, cognitive, and instrumental bonds people have with place. A more nuanced understanding of the importance of place may aid in predicting how people will react and be impacted by policy change (20), understanding why people participate or not in management (22), building trust with stakeholders, and communicating effectively (38). This would contribute to overcoming the critique that communities of use or location are ill-suited to serve as surrogates for groups with shared environment-related interests. In terms of communicating with relevant communities in the GBR region, for example, accounting for people’s bonds with the GBR could take the form of tailoring communication material to each of the four attachment communities. Tailoring communication material to the interests and values of specific audience segments increases the likelihood that the material will be read, understood, and recalled, and thus be effective in influencing attitudes and behavior (39). Although the benefits of targeting communication via audience segmentation are well recognized (40) and have long been used in business advertising and social marketing (particularly in the health sector), such approaches have yet to be widely applied in environmental management (41).

A second approach to using communities of place attachment in public participation involves policymakers and managers purposefully fostering attachment communities rather than just accounting for them. As suggested by Wynveen et al. (38), to generate broad civic support for management, managers can take an active role in contributing to conversations that help shape the thoughts and feelings that give rise to place attachment. Given that the communities of attachment we identified transcend use and location communities, individuals’ bonds with the GBR could provide a common ground with which to unite individuals who have previously been treated separately by GBR managers. This could be particularly important in regard to communities that have a history of conflict, for example, commercial fishers and tourism operators (e.g., ref. 42). Indeed, a number of studies advocate the utility of highlighting and fostering shared place attachment (9), as well as other subjective connections with nature, such as environmental values (e.g., ref. 12), for conflict resolution.

Lastly, fostering transnational communities of attachment could provide a means to engage and facilitate stewardship among nonlocal individuals who are strongly attached to the GBR (i.e., those belonging to the Reef Connected and Armchair Enthusiast communities). These communities of attachment would reflect “imagined communities” (43) and, more particularly, “imagined cosmopolitan communities of global risk,” Beck’s (44) development of Anderson’s seminal proposition that extends the concept from nations to transnational social constellations that form through shared awareness of global risk and responsibility. These communities are imagined in the sense that members “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each, lives in the image of their communion” (ref. 43, p. 6). Sociocultural and political symbols play an important role in the construction of imagined communities and, consequently, these forms of community are reliant on “worldwide communications and mobility processes” (ref. 44, p. 1353).

Transnational imagined communities in relation to the GBR are already emerging online, in the form of Twitter communities (45) and various online advocacy groups, such as “Fight for the Reef” (fightforthereef.org/), which presently has over 250,000 members. In particular, the soon-to-be launched “Citizens of the GBR” initiative (https://www.fightforourreef.org.au), self-described as a “global social purpose movement founded to empower individuals from every place…to collectively…protect and enjoy our greatest natural inheritance, the GBR,” embodies the concept of transnational imagined communities of attachment to the GBR. Thus, GBR managers have an opportunity to foster transnational communities of attachment via social media and other forms of internet communication by using imagery and discourse targeted to appeal to people’s shared bonds to the GBR, particularly emotional bonds related to identity. Such an approach is likely to be particularly successful, given the major damage sustained to the GBR by recent coral bleaching (16); threats to identity are often an important catalyst for individuals to collectively organize and engage in actions to protect their shared identity (46).

There are multiple existing pathways through which nonlocal stakeholders belonging to transnational imagined communities of GBR attachment could be engaged in stewardship in relation to the GBR. In an era of globalization, proximate environmental drivers (e.g., fishing) are increasingly influenced by processes that operate beyond the local (e.g., international market demand), thus providing opportunities for nonlocal stakeholders to contribute to stewardship of distant places. These opportunities include the following: (i) sustainable individual consumption (e.g., reducing individual carbon emissions, buying sustainably sourced fish); (ii) lobbying national governments (e.g., in regard to climate change policy), international organizations (e.g., World Heritage Committee), or transnational corporations [e.g., in regard to corporate social responsibility (6)]; and (iii) supporting relevant nongovernment organizations that operate at local to global scales to, for example, monitor implementation and compliance with environmental commitments (14). However, engaging nonlocal stakeholders in public participation in relation to the GBR will require a transformation in governance. Indeed, it is increasingly recognized that addressing contemporary sustainability challenges requires establishing multilevel global institutions (e.g., ref. 47) that enable transnational public participation (e.g., ref. 48).

Redefining types of community relevant to a resource and enabling transnational public participation have important consequences for power dynamics in environmental decision making. Indeed, given the “all-affected principle” of deliberative democracy, that “all those people who are affected by a particular law, policy or decision ought to have a voice in making it” (ref. 49, p. 16), naming types of affected communities, in itself, represents an exercise in framing power (50). The very act of designating the GBR as a World Heritage Area is an example of framing power that makes claims to the importance of nonlocal people’s values in managing the GBR. A particularly important consideration in extending the notion of community is the normative question of the appropriate balance between local and nonlocal stakeholders’ values, attachments, and power in decision making. While this is beyond the scope of our paper, it represents an important area of future research.