Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 44(6): November 2018 community participation in environmental res- toration can help project managers account for the interests of the community when designing projects and recruiting community participants. While there are numerous ways to increase inclusion of stakeholders in restoration projects (e.g., town hall meetings, public opinion surveys, etc.), participatory frameworks have been iden- tified in the literature to provide a deeper inte- gration of community members in restoration projects. Environmentally-focused restoration projects that provide deeper inclusion of mem- bers of the public often take the form of civic science or civic ecology stewardship (e.g., Dolan et al. 2015; Peters et al. 2015). Civic science has been defined in the literature to encompass the many different types of public engagement (i.e., citizen science, participatory science, democratic science) with the underlying theme of public participation in the production and/or use of scientific knowledge (Bäckstrand 2003). Civic ecology stewardship (hereafter stewardship) is most often driven from within a community (Krasny and Tidball 2012), and it is defined by the functions (conservation, management, moni- toring, education about, or advocacy) in which community members engage as part of caring for the local environment (Svendsen and Campbell 2008; Connolly et al. 2013; Svendsen et al. 2016). These two forms of inclusion can serve differ- ent roles in a restoration project and may change over time, depending on project needs and com- munity interest. Civic science can be beneficial for long-term data collection (Silvertown 2009), in which projects are looking to collect data to ask and answer scientific research questions relat- ing to the restoration. Developing a restoration project inclusive of stewardship practices may be more important for those projects looking to pro- mote community engagement in the conservation, monitoring, and management of these restored areas. Integrating community stewardship prac- tices in restoration projects that are scientist- driven and initiated is an important challenge to address, as Krasny and Tidball’s (2012) work suggests, civic ecology stewardship is often initi- ated from within communities. Therefore, it is important to identify what drives individuals to participate in these types of stewardship activities. 267 Identity and Stewardship Contributions Personal identity can guide decision making (Dresner et al. 2015) and views of personal re- sponsibility toward engaging in stewardship, environmental behavior, and a desire to con- tribute to restoration projects. Identity frames are “cognitive frameworks or schemes of the characteristics belonging to individuals, or cat- egories of individuals, as we develop our iden- tity from our social experiences” (Guichard 2001). Dresner and colleagues (2015), among others, have shown that identity frames can im- pact decision making, behavior, and interpre- tations of information. These identity frames, therefore, can guide personal desire to be an environmental steward and also guide views of personal responsibility towards engaging in restoration and the environment more broadly. Environmental identity is a formed concept of the connection between the natural environ- ment and self (Clayton 2003). This identity is formed in part by personal behavior, history, and emotional attachment; this identity impacts the ways individuals perceive and act toward the environment. From this identity comes the belief that the environment is important to peo- ple and is a key part of who someone is as an individual (Clayton 2003). Prior work has found that individuals identifying as environmental- ists predicts positive environmental behavior and being highly knowledgeable about the environ- ment (Hines et al. 1987; Kashima et al. 2014). An environmentalist identity has been concep- tualized in the literature as what it means to be an environmentally friendly person in terms of personal actions and the internal drivers of those actions (Kashima et al. 2014). Linking identity to environmental stewardship, research on stewards from Portland, Oregon, U.S., found that environmentalist identity, environmental behavior, and current civic engagement corre- lated with frequency of stewardship participation (Dresner et al. 2015). A recent study on stew- ardship groups from New York City, New York, U.S., found that those individuals participating in urban tree-planting stewardship programs exhibited an emergent, uniquely hybridized envi- ronmentalist-civic identity post-participation ©2018 International Society of Arboriculture
November 2018
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