Koekkoek, Tamara (2021) ‘Dig in’ to the roots of urban community gardening: A study on environmental stewardship in community gardening initiatives. Master thesis.
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Abstract
The introduction of the participatory society in the last decade marked a transition towards a society where citizens are expected to take greater responsibility for their social and physical environment. Growing concerns about the environment since the 1970s have prompted calls for caring for the environment for the greater public good i.e., environmental stewardship, in the decades since. In the context of these developments, this research aims to investigate (1) whether and how citizens participating in green urban initiatives as community gardens fulfil responsibilities on the basis of environmental stewardship (ES), and (2) how the concept of ES can be investigated in a methodologically valuable way. Various leverage points through which ES might be facilitated have been investigated through a document analysis, semi-structured interviews with key actors of five community gardening initiatives (CGIs), and questionnaires among volunteers of these initiatives. Findings from the questionnaires show that through their participation in a CGI volunteers seem to exhibit environmental stewardship beyond the garden’s activities, but social desirability may have influenced these results. In most CGIs, the initiator or garden caretaker seems to fulfil the role of steward in different ways: enthusing people (and continuing to do so), sharing of knowledge, and being visible to others. Herein, these actors are driven by ecological concerns i.e., improving biodiversity, to varying degrees. At the same time, often social drivers can be identified, such as the desire to act as a meeting place. This research has empirically shown that environmental stewardship in green urban citizen initiatives should be interpreted in a contextual sense, in which attention is paid to both ecological and social outcomes that are pursued for urban areas in which they are embedded. A direction for follow-up studies is to qualitatively investigate the embeddedness of CGIs in their neighbourhoods to identify the potential of these gardens in supporting local stewardship efforts among both volunteers of CGIs and nearby residents.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
|---|---|
| Degree programme: | Society, Sustainability and Planning (MSc Socio-spatial Planning) |
| Supervisor: | Roo, G. de and Rauws, W.S. |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Feb 2021 10:41 |
| Last Modified: | 26 Feb 2021 14:15 |
| URI: | https://frw.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/3441 |
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