By Kai Chan, Commissioning Editor
Sometimes the best articles don’t get written. This may be because they don’t fit any journal, topic or structure. Or because they would be tough to steer through peer-review (because you can imagine the challenge it might receive). Or because there’s no existing team that would or could write such a piece. Sometimes people just need to be asked.…
People and Nature has always been focused on intentionally growing the broad field of people-nature relationships, and doing it in a way that grows a community.
We are responding to the gap by intentionally commissioning articles that we think are crucial for advancing our understanding of people-nature relationships, but likely wouldn’t otherwise get written. This blog post explains three new kinds of review/synthesis articles that we’re inviting, and how you can get involved.
Article type #1: Toward Transformative Change
Analyzing people-nature systems, including key actors and dynamics, with an eye toward interventions that might enable dynamic system change toward sustainability
Our tagline for PaN is a “journal of relational thinking”. It doesn’t specify systems, but they’re closely related, since systems are clusters of relationships. It is now widely acknowledged that harmonious people-nature relationships will require change that is not just incremental but also transformative (“A fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values”). As we noted recently, however, most PaN articles consider only a small set of interactions, with relatively few interactions across an apparent people-nature divide.
Other journals focus more explicitly on systems, of course, often with specific analytical frames (e.g., resilience thinking). A gap remains in synthesizing what’s known, and what’s not known, about specific systems and how they function (or how they’re stuck). So, PaN is seeking syntheses tailored to enable the kinds of interventions that might tip systems toward more sustainable trajectories. They might follow emerging threads like about levers and leverage points, but they need not. Relative to the many articles that touch upon system problems and solutions, these articles would be more integrative, take an explicit systems perspective with an applied or practical focus, and incorporate or address conflicting perspectives.
These Syntheses Toward Transformative Change would be freed of the constraints of any particular structure of review, given that the diverse forms of evidence across fields would often not fit tidily within a comprehensive literature review (for instance). They might centre around a biome (e.g., coral reefs, grasslands, great lakes), a region (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa, the North Sea, Polynesia), an industry (e.g., palm oil, rare earth mining, aquaculture), or whatever else makes sense from a systems perspective.
Article type #2: Human Relationships with Nature (and how they vary)
Synthesizing, analyzing, and discussing human relationships with specific taxonomic groups or ecosystem components, and how they have changed over time or vary across regions
People and Nature is filled with articles about human relationships with nature, but it’s piecemeal. Given the reductionist or otherwise constrained nature of much academic study, most of our articles delve into human relationships with specific ecosystems, or through particular actions, at one point in time. The whole is much more than the sum of the parts, but piecing it together is not straightforward. We know that human relationships with animals, plants, other organisms, and habitats vary and change, but how?
The field of historical ecology includes many examples of place-based examinations of this question across time, but they often focus on specific regions and stop short of the present. And there are ecological examples of how specific ecosystem attributes vary across space. But we don’t know of many examples of this more relational approach, which addresses multiple dimensions of relationships (not just quantifiable ecosystem structures and functions), and include the present day. PaN is seeking article-length syntheses that adopt an interdisciplinary approach to integrate multiple aspects of people-nature relationships across space and/or time.
Again, these interdisciplinary contributions would be freed of the constraints imposed by any individual field or discipline, so that authors have the freedom to take approaches that are appropriate for this expansive purpose. These Syntheses of Human Relationships with Nature might centre around a taxonomic group (e.g., sharks, bees, snakes), an ecosystem or biome (e.g., deserts, seagrass meadows), or an ecosystem component (e.g., soil, fire, tsunamis).
Article Type #3: Forged Cross-Pollination
Collaborating across difference to address a controversial topic by constructively juxtaposing perspectives that generally appear separately
Too often, some of the most important topics are so divisive that those ‘for’ and ‘against’ talk past one another, in separate literatures. For instance, with monetary valuation of nature, or economic growth vs. degrowth, the crowds for and against divide along lines in the literature, with conventional economics on one side, and critical theorists and/or ecological economists on the other. Reading just one of these literatures is often persuasive. Reading both sides is often detrimental to one’s ability to function, however: too often the fundamental critiques or raison d’être of one side are ignored by the other. Sometimes the conflict stems partly from different research paradigms or standards of knowledge.
A relational journal is one that puts each side in context, treating both with respect. This, of course, is easier said than done. To represent either side appropriately takes years of study and immersion. To do so for both sides and to maintain a sympathetic perspective is nigh impossible. Our deeply human tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance fights fiercely against this. PaN’s solution here is to harness the power of cross-pollination or adversarial collaboration, seeking articles written by unlikely collaborators to represent disparate perspectives on contentious topics fairly and thoroughly.
As above, these collaborative contributions would be freed of rigid expectations of structure. These Cross-Pollinating Syntheses would be review-like papers that thoughtfully discuss the contrasting perspectives on important issues (see here for an effort to bridge interdisciplinary perspectives, and here for an effort within ecology). They might focus on technologies, laws, policies, approaches to management or science engagement, or broader paradigms.
If you have an idea for a topic, author, or team that you would like to see featured in PaN and you think might otherwise be missed, we’d love to hear from you (e-mail us at Editorial@people-and-nature.org).
While the three themes mentioned in this blog post will be our commissioning focus over the coming months, PaN is also interested in Review and Synthesis and Perspective papers on many other topics. Manuscripts examining all aspects of human-nature relationships can be submitted directly to the journal at any time—please don’t wait to be asked!
Relational Thinking 