Place-based Perspective Research Articles

The adoption of a place-based framework to inform municipal health strategies

Abstract Background Health is a place-based issue. Research shows that inequalities in health are significantly influenced by social, economic, and environmental factors, making local policies related to these domains critical determinants. Yet, place-based health planning remains underutilized by local practitioners, not receiving adequate attention from policy-makers. Departing from the Municipal Health Strategy of Coimbra, this presentation aims to showcase the framework used for guiding municipal health planning, addressing multidimensional factors, geographic analysis, intersectoral collaboration and participatory approaches. Methods The conceptual and methodological framework followed a population health approach with a geographic lens, looking at how the health outcomes and health determinants were geographically distributed across the municipality (data disaggregated at sub-municipal level), as well as the extent to which policies from multiple sectors can address them. The planning cycle followed an iterative seven-stage process based in five key actions: 1 - Assess (Health Profile), 2 - Prioritize (Priorities), 3 - Plan (Objectives and Strategies), 4 - Implement (Action Plan) and 5 - Monitor (Targets and Measures, Monitoring Plan). Participatory processes were conducted involving local stakeholders and citizens to identify needs, establish priorities and actions. Results The framework for action integrates 14 goals and 94 actions across six policy domains: Sustainable Mobility and Public Places, Safe and Adequate Housing, Accessible Healthcare, Social Cohesion and Participation, Education and Health Literacy and Intersectoral and Collaborative Leadership. Conclusions Adopting a place-based framework to health planning, involving a geographical and multidimensional health assessment as well as the participation of local stakeholders and citizens, was considered effective in turning evidence into practice. Key messages • Municipal health strategies should be developed with a place-based perspective, prioritizing health as the focal point across various intersectoral municipal policies. • The integrated framework shed light on the experience of co-creation to inform health-oriented planning, ensuring that actions address specific needs of localities.

Place-based and sectoral patterns in urban experimentation: Implications for deep transitions research

Transforming critical infrastructure systems, such as water and energy, is crucial to achieving global sustainability and climate change targets in many cities. Whilst experimentation has been studied extensively in urban sustainability scholarships, there have been no large-N cross-sector comparative studies. Existing research is potentially blind to different patterns of urban experiments across multiple sectors. This is particularly relevant to advancing deep transitions thinking, which has increasingly foregrounded the notion of multi-system alignment across socio-technical domains. Our research aims to fill this knowledge gap using a database to characterise urban experiments across water and energy domains while integrating sectoral and place-based perspectives. We analysed 40 experiments across Melbourne and Adelaide, Australia. Our results show that on a collective level, these experiments skew towards technological interventions, while their transfer and impact trajectories are underpinned by distinct territorial and sectoral logics. We show that cross-sectoral analysis can reveal plurality in urban experiments across multiple systems and places while offering a more refined understanding of multi-system alignment requirements for deep transitions.

Place-Based Perspectives on Understanding the Value of Sustainable Heritage-Inspired Arts and Crafts in Jordan

This article highlights the challenges of rigorously evaluating and meaningfully communicating the socio-economic impacts of arts and crafts in northern Jordan. This article aims to identify and analyse the challenges confronting place-based arts and crafts industries in Jordan and propose valid policies and practices to address these challenges. The methodology employed involved a comprehensive review of the existing literature to elucidate the challenges faced by heritage-based artisans, and we propose several policies aimed at promoting and safeguarding the arts and crafts heritage. The findings supporting this research were derived from a series of practical workshops and focus group interviews conducted in 2022. This article also presents empirical evidence to highlight the identified challenges. It emphasises the importance of the proposed policy recommendations for the Jordanian sector, providing the audience with a sense of empowerment and an understanding of the potential solutions. This work could offer insights into how local communities innovatively leverage creative capacities, create localised impact, and address local challenges. We argue that the value of arts and crafts is better understood locally to provide impactful experiences based on community-led and community-generated creativity and flexibility. A creative participatory approach is used to create contemporary art designs and train young people on artistic and craft-making skills, application, and production as a credible precedent and best practice for developing creative cultural “enterprises” in Jordan.

A Place-Based Perspective of Cross-Sectoral Collaborations

A Place-Based Perspective of Cross-Sectoral Collaborations

Moving behind the scenes of public space: the differentiation of market traders’ routinized mobilities

ABSTRACT The politics of public space, such as food and retail markets, has predominantly been studied from place-based perspectives. Most studies focus on the intercultural interactions and social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion as they develop in these places. Less research attention has been devoted, however, to how questions of accessibility and emplacement are intrinsically related to everyday mobilities that surround and come together in public space. By interviewing and physically following market traders who work on the central outdoor market of a town in the Netherlands, this article approaches traders’ mobilities to and away from markets as social practices that involve careful navigation. Three contrasting narratives of mobility-as-navigation are outlined, relating to the stories of the ‘established’, ‘searching’ and ‘roaming’ trader. The findings demonstrate that differences in navigation can be explained by the interdependencies between both individual and material/structural factors. The focus on mobility-as-navigation reveals not only the complex and sometimes contested ways in which people differently move to and away from public space, but it also shows how it leads to differentiated presence on, and access to, these places.

Equality, diversity and inclusion and gendered analysis for place-based hydrogen solutions

A global endeavour to accelerate reduction of the carbon dioxide emissions (‘decarbonisation’) of the economy and to encourage the use of diverse non-fossil-fuel energy vectors, including hydrogen, is underway. Hydrogen transitions are mainly driven by technological specifications and centred on the adoption of new specialised skills. Limited attention is given to other social aspects such as workforce diversity and existing local skills sets, which are also critical to enabling such transitions. There is strong evidence that the energy sector is male-dominated. However, there is growing consensus that gender diversity in energy sector workforces can bring about socio-economic and environmental benefits. Place is also increasingly gaining recognition as a key driver of social, economic and environmental benefits from energy transition. This paper reviews 26 national and regional hydrogen strategies, through a gendered analysis and a place-based perspective, to evaluate the extent to which developing hydrogen solutions in a range of locations is furthering equality, diversity and inclusion towards a just transition – a fair distribution of benefits and opportunities across genders. The paper aims to open up a discussion with engineers, decision makers and hydrogen industry professionals about applying gendered and place-specific analysis to emerging decarbonisation technologies.

Caring neighbourhood and loneliness: Importance of applying a place-based perspective.

Background: Loneliness is recognized as an important societal challenge, with high policy attention the last years. In Flanders an important policy objective is to counteract loneliness by investing in so-called caring neighbourhoods. Although some research indicates that physical and social neighbourhood characteristics (e.g. public parks, public transportation) affect loneliness, little is known in this respect. 
 Aim: The goal of this workshop is to gain more insight into the relation between the neighbourhood and loneliness. Further, much loneliness research is limited to specific age groups and does not take into account the different dimensions of loneliness (emotional, social and existential). This distinction is nevertheless crucial because interventions that aim to counteract loneliness must be tailored around the unique needs of the individual and must consider specific dimensions of loneliness. 
 Participants: The workshop is for everyone interested in how neighbourhood characteristics impact loneliness among people of all ages, and on how to deal with this in research and practice. Both people with and without experience in the subject are welcome.
 Design of the workshop:
 1.Inspirational presentations (40’)
 •Insight into loneliness prevalence. Hannelore Stegen conducted a systematic literature review and meta-analysis on the prevalence of loneliness among community-dwelling older people. We will discuss how different measurement instruments and modes of datacollection lead to different results.
 •Presentation of the FWO-SBO project ‘A Lonely Planet?’. In this part, we discuss which neighbourhood characteristics relate to the risk of loneliness. Leen Heylen, Liesbeth De Donder and Jasper De Witte present the first results of the interuniversity research project A Lonely Planet? Addressing LONELIness from a PLAce-based perspective: research on the influence of Neighbourhood and Environment. Goal is to increase our understanding on the role of neighbourhood characteristics in loneliness.
 •Third, SAAMO Limburg & West-Vlaanderen (i.e. Community Building Organisation) add a practitioner perspective. Together we dive into possibilities on how to deal with tackling and preventing loneliness in caring neighbourhoods. Which neighbourhood level practices can prevent or alleviate loneliness? They present their experiences with several practical projects. 
 •After each presentation, space is reserved for questions and reflections of the audience. 
 2.Interactive work-tables. Through interactive “work-tables” with the participants, we aim to formulate specific recommendations on how to prevent and counteract loneliness from a neighbourhood perspective. (35’)
 Table 1: Which neighbourhood characteristics relate to the risk of loneliness among adults?
 Table 2: How do neighbourhood characteristics relate to the risk of loneliness among adults?
 Table 3: In which manner can loneliness be prevented and alleviated on a neighbourhood level?
 3.Closing: plenary ‘sharing’ session (15’)
 A participant of each table shares the main take-away-home messages from their table. 
 End goal: The goal of this workshop is to create awareness among the participants about the impact that neighbourhood characteristics can have on the level of loneliness among people of all ages, as well as on how to deal with it in practice, research and policy. The co-created content of the workshop will be gathered in a report and shared on the website of “A Lonely Planet”.

Place-based business support towards net zero: enabling through the place-policy-practice nexus

The prevailing approach of policymakers to the design and delivery of net zero business support remains focused on financial economic growth. This approach limits the role of businesses in leading societal transformation towards a sustainable future. Although opportunities for businesses to transform so that they remain financially viable and resilient may emerge, support and policy innovation are needed to enable businesses to navigate the net zero transition. Place-based policies are one way of ensuring localities, cities and regions respond effectively to the economic and social challenges of the transition. Despite place being identified as one of five foundations of national and local industrial strategies, business support provision across the regions remains largely ‘place-blind’. Support programmes are often generic in their design, scope and delivery mechanisms, and downplay the challenges businesses face when engaging with the net zero transition. This article critically reviews the policy articulation and the state of net zero business support from the place-based perspective. By applying place–policy–practice nexus thinking, gap analysis of net zero support is undertaken, and resolutions are offered. The article calls for a deeper reflection of place characteristics in policy discourse, local strategies and policy mixes. This requires concerted efforts from the government, support agencies, universities and businesses to develop a shared understanding of the growth opportunities and risks of the net zero transition relative to place. This includes the development of representative net zero governance mechanisms and addressing the growing demand for net zero skills.

Transformations in Local Social Action in Portugal

The decentralization of social functions to municipalities, also known as municipal decentralization, triggered new contexts of practice in municipal social intervention. Municipalities are now dealing with more work and a focus on working in partnerships, which calls for greater dynamism of the local social action teams. This process has pushed the social workers to practices that alternate between mediation through the construction of access to a universal standard of social rights and the development of social intervention models with specific access to certain contexts and social groups. The objective of this paper is to envision new forms of standardization of social action within the framework of municipal decentralization, combining place-based perspectives with community and structural social work. What can we learn from social workers’ perspectives on the context of social functions in order to envision forms of place-based standardization of municipal social action? We seek to analyze the professional visions of local social action systems reform, discussing new contexts of practice; new place-based functions; and their correlation with political mediation for universal and intermunicipal social rights, instrumental dimensions of concrete work, and dimensions of value attributed to practicing social work. We organized the research according to the phenomenological paradigm, mobilizing the qualitative method and the multiple-case study. Based on evidence from the discourse of all professionals involved in the study, the findings indicate that the transformations of local social action systems, associated with the processes of social functions decentralization, imply greater comprehensiveness of social intervention, the ability to work in partnerships, and new place-based approach matrices, but they also present challenges for social workers in terms of multilevel governance that may favor the standardization of access to better social well-being between municipal territories.

Archipelagic Currents in the Global Novel

Abstract Crime fiction, a frequently translated and highly translatable literary genre, has generated perspectives on the global and the local in ways that shape cartographies of world literature. The Indonesian novel 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio is a case study for how specific texts within the genre can serve as points of departure for theorizing cultural geography in an imaginative mode. Analyzing Gaspar through three spatial optics, this paper considers the novel’s global influences, the elements that fall into relief as local in translation, and – by attending to patterns of movement and contact that complicate place-based perspectives – the archipelagic qualities of the text. By imagining this alternative conception of literary space, Armandio’s novel recasts the contemporary global novel as the product of contact, mobility, and linguistic and material flows rather than sites of static national or regional identity.

The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation

In the decades leading to the Civil War, Maryland's Southern proclivities and sympathies were strongest in the rural Eastern Shore, where some of the oldest and wealthiest families owned plantations fueled by slavery. In The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation, Lucy Maddox details everyday life, individual biographies, and the interpersonal relationships on Rose Hill, an Upper South plantation on Sassafras Neck, through the 1840s. Maddox's study is unusual because it benefits from a woman's diary. Few such diaries remain from antebellum-era, midsize, mixed-farming plantations in a “middle state” like Maryland. As a result, The People of Rose Hill contributes an important and significant place-based perspective on a turbulent era in the nation's history.Maddox first establishes the poignancy of the antebellum era by casting forward to discuss the Emancipation Proclamation, the border states, and the Civil War. She then turns back in time to establish the history, setting, and characters of Rose Hill. The people enslaved to Thomas Forman, the owner of Rose Hill, lived during a critical historical moment “in which men like Forman acted on their belief that the future prospects of the country required a continuation not only of their energy, their skills, their legitimate desire to improve the lives of Americans, but also of the slave culture they had done so much to shape” (5). The people enslaved at Rose Hill, and those who interacted with them, of course, shouldered the implementation of Forman's ethos. The main characters include Forman (Revolutionary War hero, businessman, cad), Martha Ogle (reluctant bride, disappointed wife, attentive household manager), hired overseers and servants, and enslaved persons. Martha's diary is a treasure: her record of everyday life, in combination with family records and letters and archival records, aids in developing biographical portraits of real people who would otherwise be lost to history. Maddox reads between the lines in order to glean people's attitudes and interpersonal relationships, which is useful for understanding the motivations and strategies for behaviors and events discussed by Martha. In addition, Maddox addresses gaps in historical knowledge about Rose Hill by exploring broader practices through comparative material from other Eastern Shore plantations in Maryland.By recording daily activities and perceptions, Martha inadvertently insured that the people enslaved at Rose Hill would not be forgotten. Maddox draws on Martha's diary to reconstruct as much as she can about each enslaved person, especially their family relationships and where and when they worked at the plantation. Martha notes summoning doctors to attend to difficult births or ailing people, the talent of some individuals for certain tasks, and the ongoing laborious work facing her and the people she supervised. These provide a sense of what a day, a season, or a year was like at Rose Hill. There are also portraits of men, women, and children. For example, Martha described Rachel Allen Antigua in glowing terms, a “perfect” servant whom she moved from the fields into the house. She performed precisely as Martha wished and was adored for it. But the enslaved, however favored, were also their own people. Samuel Gilmore, a favorite of Thomas's who was trained to manage horses and accompanied him to races, executed a “French exit,” and despite Martha's belief that he would return, he never did.Maddox's study complements current literature that aims to restore agency to enslaved people. Closing the introduction, Maddox notes that “in spite of our best efforts . . . no matter how intensely we may examine an enslaved life, when we are done, we can still only wonder how close we have managed to come to the truth” (21). The critical irony, however, is that the source material makes it impossible not to return to Thomas and Martha as reference points. I was thus surprised that Maddox drew from the history, but not the archaeology, of Wye Plantation and related sites, which has added considerable primary source information about the lives of enslaved people. I also wondered about the integrity of the plantation home and its potential to yield information about life at Rose Hill. Maddox notes, however, that the plantation house has been remodeled several times and is now a private home. Since Rose Hill is not a museum, its story would be inaccessible to the public without Maddox's study. As a result, in The People of Rose Hill, Maddox provides not only an academic contribution but a public service in writing an accessible, fascinating study about real people living in challenging times.

Revisión sistemática de la percepción de riesgo en agricultores ante la sequía: factores de influencia, contenidos percibidos, estrategias de adaptación y prácticas asociadas

Drought is an extreme climatic event that generates large impacts and losses in agriculture, causing the increase of global food insecurity and unsustainability of rural livelihoods. Based on this, the objective of this research was to conduct a systematic review of empirical studies that have reported the relationship between risk perception and adaptive strategies of farmers in the face of drought. For this reason, the review followed the guidelines and recommendations of the PRISMA statement. The databases consulted were Web of Science, Scopus and EBSCO. In total, 50 empirical studies, in Spanish and English, published between 2010 and 2021, that met the selection criteria were reviewed. The results highlight thdifferent factors influencingisk perception (years of experience, level of schooling, among others) and adaptation strategies (farm size, gender, access to credit, etc.). Finally, the effects of drought at the crop, livestock, personal and environmental levels were identified. In conclusion, we discuss its implications and limitations, highlighting the absence of studies in the Latin American region and in Spanish language. Future studies should be done with a place-based perspective, under which adaptive knowledge, beliefs, practices and actions can be recognized. On the other hand, climate change mitigation policies and programs must be proposed and implemented at a local scale.

Multiscale Dimensions of Spatial Process: COVID-19 Fully Vaccinated Rates in U.S. Counties

IntroductionThis study aimed to examine the heterogeneity of the associations between social determinants and COVID-19 fully vaccinated rate.MethodsThis study proposes 3 multiscale dimensions of spatial process, including level of influence (the percentage of population affected by a certain determinant across the entire area), scalability (the spatial process of a determinant into global, regional, and local process), and specificity (the determinant that has the strongest association with the fully vaccinated rate). The multiscale geographically weighted regression was applied to the COVID-19 fully vaccinated rates in U.S. counties (N=3,106) as of October 26, 2021, and the analyses were conducted in May 2022.ResultsThe results suggest the following: (1) Percentage of Republican votes in the 2020 presidential election is a primary influencer because 84% of the U.S. population lived in counties where this determinant is found the most dominant; (2) Demographic compositions (e.g., percentages of racial/ethnic minorities) play a larger role than socioeconomic conditions (e.g., unemployment) in shaping fully vaccinated rates; (3) The spatial process underlying fully vaccinated rates is largely local.ConclusionsThe findings challenge the 1-size-fits-all approach to designing interventions promoting COVID-19 vaccination and highlight the importance of a place-based perspective in ecological health research.

Working across boundaries in regional place-based food systems: Triggering transformation in a time of crisis

Drawing on research exploring food system change in a region in the North of England during the Covid-19 health pandemic, in this paper we explore how a “managerial” approach to food system governance and provisioning embedded in national food systems and international supply chains was suddenly supplanted by a more “open” approach. By enabling understanding of how food system change unfolded as a diverse range of hidden practices unexpectedly became visible, it contributes to food systems thinking through the development of a regional place-based perspective. We use this approach to understand the outcome of these processes and to investigate how embedding change across administrative and geographical boundaries can enable food system transformation to improve food security for future generations.

Capturing the Civic Lives of Cities: An Organizational, Place-Based Perspective on Civil Society in Global Cities

Introduction to Global Perspectives special collection: The Civic Life of Cities around the World In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society? Our co-produced approach to studying civil societies through a place-based, organizational lens provides fresh answers to perennial questions about voice, accountability, and embeddedness. The six articles in this collection on the civic life of cities draw on more than 1,400 interviews with organizational leaders in San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Moving beyond the “big theories” of civil society, the articles illustrate the value of our dual emphasis on place and organizations by showing how comparisons of the people, practices, and partnerships of civil society organizations enable new middle-range theories of civil society. This approach promises to offer rich comparative insights into similarities and differences among organizations around the globe.

Recoding Landscape Education: Research-Based Studio Approach

The landscapes and the memory of the landscapes are evolving with natural and human-centered activities. In some places, landscapes continue to reveal their memory ecologically, socially, and culturally. On the other hand, in some places, landscapes lose their ecologic and socio-cultural archive as a result of globalization. This issue causes to emerge fragile landscapes according to lack of water resources, global warming, a decrease in biodiversity. Preserving the memory of landscapes and using it in the practice of landscape is a deeply crucial issue. The paper tries to answer two questions: How can landscape memory be used in design education? How can a research-based design studio pedagogy be conducted on this approach? This paper focuses on the research-based design approach in landscape architecture education to decode and recode the memory of the landscapes in the design process. ITU Landscape Architecture Department 2019-2020 Fall Semester Landscape Design Studio I-II, which is the case study of the research, worked in Savur, Mardin. The study area provides unexpected landscape carpet including browns and greens together in the valleys of the region that have a rich social and ecological structure. The methodological process of the studio was based on the three approaches which are integrated into each other: The Landscape Memory Model, Action-based Design Studio, and Research-based Design Studio. The model provides a guide for reading the memory of the landscape with various memory codes hidden under the visible and invisible values of it. This core process is used by the students for understanding the cultural and ecological values of the study area and implementing them into the design process. The action-based studio approach allows the tutors to find the problematic points in the design process of each student and resolve them in a positive way. Covering these two approaches, the research-based design studio expresses the discovery of the knowledge through a strong research process. The results are as followed: Implementing a research-based process ensured a place-based and innovative perspective to shape a design concept. Using the pre-specified landscape memory model empowered the research phase and helped students to analyze and discern the place with their own perceptions. Action-based flow allowed the instructors to leave the conventional studio performing and helped to use in-situ (special to the studio) instructing techniques within the semester. This paper may be influential for especially landscape design studios and relocate conventional studio approaches with more flexible and progressive techniques to understand the place and beyond.

Assessing COVID-19 risk with temporal indices and geographically weighted ordinal logistic regression in US counties.

PurposeResearch on the novel coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) mainly relies on cross-sectional data, but this approach fails to consider the temporal dimension of the pandemic. This study assesses three temporal dimensions of the COVID-19 infection risk in US counties, namely probability of occurrence, duration of the pandemic, and intensity of transmission, and investigate local patterns of the factors associated with these risks.MethodsAnalyzing daily data between January 22 and September 11, 2020, we categorize the contiguous US counties into four risk groups—High-Risk, Moderate-Risk, Mild-Risk, and Low-Risk—and then apply both conventional (i.e., non-spatial) and geographically weighted (i.e., spatial) ordinal logistic regression model to understand the county-level factors raising the COVID-19 infection risk. The comparisons of various model fit diagnostics indicate that the spatial models better capture the associations between COVID-19 risk and other factors.ResultsThe key findings include (1) High- and Moderate-Risk counties are clustered in the Black Belt, the coastal areas, and Great Lakes regions. (2) Fragile labor markets (e.g., high percentages of unemployed and essential workers) and high housing inequality are associated with higher risks. (3) The Monte Carlo tests suggest that the associations between covariates and COVID-19 risk are spatially non-stationary. For example, counties in the northeastern region and Mississippi Valley experience a stronger impact of essential workers on COVID-19 risk than those in other regions, whereas the association between income ratio and COVID-19 risk is stronger in Texas and Louisiana.ConclusionsThe COVID-19 infection risk levels differ greatly across the US and their associations with structural inequality and sociodemographic composition are spatially non-stationary, suggesting that the same stimulus may not lead to the same change in COVID-19 risk. Potential interventions to lower COVID-19 risk should adopt a place-based perspective.

Towards a regional approach for skills policy

ABSTRACT Focusing on the UK as a case study, this paper offers a critical discussion of current approaches for skills policy in the context of the increasing spatial imbalances that characterize advanced economies. We outline an integrated framework for regional skills policy, allowing a shift from ex-post interventions on industry-specific skills deficiencies towards a place-based perspective reflecting the dynamic evolution of skills requirements. Building on a systemic institutional approach, the proposed framework identifies synergies across skills and regional development policies connecting them through the role of shared skills in providing horizontal platforms, enhancing combinatorial opportunities across sectors for resilient structural change.

A Caribou Decline Foreshadowed by Inuit in the Central Canadian Arctic: A Retrospective Analysis

The Dolphin and Union (DU) caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus x pearyi), locally referred to as Island caribou, is a unique and at-risk ecotype of caribou that ranges on Victoria Island and the adjacent mainland in the central Canadian Arctic. To facilitate the incorporation of traditional knowledge (TK) and better inform the required species recovery plan, we analyzed an archived set of TK interviews done in Ekaluktutiak and Kugluktuk, Nunavut, in 2003. The overarching theme throughout the interviews was that the DU caribou were dynamic, constantly adapting to the changing environment around them. Accounts provided previously unexplored connections between temporal and spatial trends in DU caribou distribution, population, ecology, and disease syndromes. Findings of fewer animals, range shift, and increased observations of disease in the late 1990s and early 2000s suggest that early signs of the declines that have resulted in the herd being reassessed as endangered today were already apparent to Kugluktukmiut in 2003. In contrast, Ekaluktutiakmiut were seeing a stable population. Shifts in caribou range and consequently harvesting ranges were described by both communities, but more evident in Kugluktuk. When combined, the differing accounts of the two communities provided a deeper understanding of caribou ecology and trends across seasons, years, and a broad spatial range. Community differences demonstrate the cruciality of considering unique place-based perspectives and the importance of mobilizing TK from communities and knowledge keepers throughout the caribou range for a herd-level understanding. This study highlights the importance of timely analyses and reporting on TK studies to ensure a nimble conservation response in a rapidly changing environment.

Decolonising the environment through African epistemologies

This paper examines African epistemologies of the environment as a place-based perspective that regards nature as having its inherent value, personhood, and agency. It presents the African way of relating with or living in the environment as a way of becoming one with nature beyond the discourse of the Anthropocene and environmental change. In particular, we will take African epistemological perspectives from Southern and Eastern Africa, the notions of Ubuntu and Tabot, to reflect on how the environment is traditionally perceived as sacred and part of a living community. The paper also considers how African indigenous ways of knowing and becoming one with nature have been supplanted through epistemic violence, the imposition of western views of the environment over African worldviews through systems and institutions that exclude or exploit local knowledges. Using Ethiopia as a case study, the paper demonstrates how epistemic violence is enacted by excluding indigenous knowledges of the environment from education and disseminating Eurocentric views of the environment. It shall show how the collecting and hording of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions has contributed to this loss of indigenous environmental knowledge. Finally, we will examine the importance of African perspectives to decolonise our ways of knowing and relating with the environment, and offer critical insights on how African epistemologies could be used to build a future that is decolonised and sustainable.