Receipts for a healthy nature. Exploring municipal officials’ framings of biodiversity and human-environmental relationships in Sweden

Abstract

Cities and their governance structures face myriad environmental and sustainability challenges and are often important sites for environmental action. This is the case for biodiversity protection, which is increasingly an urban policy focus. Concomitant to this are conceptualisations of human-environmental relationships. Exploring and problematising such relationships is an increasingly prominent concern within sustainability science, not least around urban planning. In this article, I explore how public officials at four Swedish municipalities frame biodiversity protection within urban planning. The article contributes by increasing knowledge of how the concept of biodiversity is applied at the level of local government. I apply Pálsson’s typology of human-environmental relationships. Analysis of these data reveals a predominance of paternalistic views of human-environmental relations. Biodiversity is considered a measurable indicator for wider nature; a feature of place; a source of value and something that can be engineered. Uniting these framings is the paternalistic view of ‘nature’ as a separate entity to ‘society’, and that biodiversity is framed as a largely technical issue. The implications of these framings are that alternative views of human-environmental relations and the diversity of society are currently occluded. This is relevant as the public officials participating in this study, including ‘ecologists’ and ‘landscape architects’, were equivocal about the prospect of combining biodiversity protection and urban development.