Plain Language Summary: The Facilitating Act Framework: a new insight into cultural ecosystem services through investigating women, wild swimming and community.

By Seb O’Connor, Lucy Barnard, and Klaus Glenk.

Read the full paper here.

The ways in which people interact with, and benefit from, nature are individualized and complex. Yet, when scientists study how people interact with nature they typically select and impose ideas prior to beginning a study, for example, by deciding to study and then asking about something like pre-defined Cultural Ecosystem Services.  

Here, we present an innovative approach to studying these complex human-nature relationships: The Facilitating Act Framework. This Framework first identifies an activity, such as hiking or wild swimming, which facilitates human-nature interactions. The Facilitating Act Framework then facilitates participants to explore the dynamics of that human-nature interaction. Participants are encouraged to draw on their experiences to guide the research to what is important to them. This may include how they access nature, how they benefit from it, and how nature affects their connection to others. The framework is thus participatory, open-ended and process-oriented.

We tested the effectiveness of Facilitating Act Framework by applying it to the ways in which the act of wild swimming may allow women to connect with community and nature. We used Q methodology, a flexible semi-structured interview method, to gather data from 25 women across Scotland. From this, we identified four stylised groups of women, characterising their engagement with nature through wild swimming: “the competitive edge;” “connection-to-nature seekers;” “sharers and carers;” and the “enablers.” Each group of women had their own reason for connecting with nature. Importantly, community plays an important role: each group of women had accessed the wider wild swimming community through different routes, formally or informally. The case study of woman and wild swimming demonstrates that the Facilitating Act Framework bridges relational thinking to policy-making by focusing on an action that could be subject to policy. Information flows link up policy makers and individuals by utilising these informal networks around acts in nature, to hold regulatory bodies accountable for bathing quality or to share local safety knowledge, for example.

In conclusion, the Facilitating Act Framework opens up an avenue to deepen our understanding of how values emerge through human-nature interactions to embed relational thinking.