Eco-Cultural Production in a Changing World

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We live in an increasingly urbanized world, and one where the evidence indicates that disconnection from 'nature' affects us negatively. The response to overcoming this diconnection has taken two distinct approaches: - attempts to provide nature for people, and to involve people in planning and consultation approaches to ensure their requirements are met;- a gradual (and now accelerating) move to community control and/or ownership of land and natural spaces - instigated from the bottom-up by communities themselves.These twin approaches of 'providing nature' and 'managing nature' are paralleled by the twin assessments of how people are 'enjoying/experiencing/consuming nature' and 'producing nature/ecosystem services'. Much of the work to date has focused on one or other part of this duality. Our vision is to connect these forms of participation in both the consumption and production of nature. To do so, it is essential to take as the starting point the experiences, narratives and creative activities of those participating. These creative activities include participatory art (e.g. woodland sculpture making, music or edible artwork), community festivals (e.g. harvest festivals) and events (e.g. learning heritage skills). Our research focus, then, is on the question 'How do cultural and creative activities help to shape the connections between people, places and production' - we have termed this 'eco-cultural production'. The aim of this proposal is to build a network that that brings together a partnership of academia and community stakeholders form a range of disciplines and backgrounds to co-produce outputs (including a large grant proposal) that will specify how arts and humanities research and creative activities can be developed to assess and enhance the role of these eco-cultural production activities in providing benefits from nature that bring improvements in wellbeing to people and communities.The outputs from this network will be a review of the latest literature, including information from the communities themselves. The main aim of the project will be to write a grant application developed and designed to address the questions relevant to the partnership of communities involved in eco-production and academics from the arts and humanities.