Anthropology’s focus on the holistic dimensions of the human condition, its interest in understanding humankind’s cultural variation wherever it occurs, and its sensitivity to both similarities and differences, while never losing sight of the powers of politics, ideologies, economies, and ecologies, provide a solid foundation for the exploration and understanding of environmental communication. This book tries to make sense of how an anthropological perspective can further our understanding of the diversity of environmental communication and the different ways people—verbally and non-verbally—communicate about and with their surrounding environments. An important aspect lies in the discussion of the communicative prospects for sustainability, seeking to bring anthropology into more theoretically and empirically productive engagement with the study of environmental communication.

The pandemic spread of COVID-19 grew inexorably to be the main topic of global news after it was first identified in 2019 in China. This article analyzes how heads of state and heads of government in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden framed the problems and solutions to the spread of the virus during the pandemic's initial phase. A Foucauldian-inspired method of problematization guides the narrative analysis, complemented by governmentality, risk communication, and taskscape theories. The results of the analysis show how the individual is conceptualized as a central actor and whose practices are framed as crucial to overcoming the crisis. Through invoking a sense of responsibility, sacrifice, and current life during the pandemic as a difficult time, the speeches allude to how people through changed behavior can/sould, contribute to the greater good. The individual is positioned as a key cause of, and solution to the problem; however, construing the individual as an indispensable actor to overcoming the crisis also means that the individual is laid open for reprehension. To facilitate the spread of the containment message and to support individual understanding of overt risk, the four countries' leadership also augment their conceptualization of the crisis with ideas of national identity to inspire the individual to contribute to the “battle” and “defeat” of the virus. The leadership does also embrace the important role of the national government in controlling the outbreak and the role of science, and trust in science, are also emphasized. The speeches analyzed in this paper can be understood as governance technologies; the spatial disciplining and self-governance demanded by the regimes create subject positions for individuals or groups. A debate on the rights and responsibilities of the citizen is another aspect that comes to the fore, considering how the containment strategies in all four countries proclaim the individual as a core agent in circumscribing the virus, and hence the individual's activities as potentially damaging to the fight against the pandemic. This throws into question the connection between individual autonomy as a democratic right and disciplinary mechanisms, sometimes phrased encouragingly and at other times in an enforcing way.

Ensuring sustainable carnivore populations while simultaneously sustaining active and viable pastoral communities often creates conflicts that are difficult to resolve. This article examines how different knowledge systems meet and interact in large carnivore governance in Norway and Sweden. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including observations in meetings, public documents, reports and interviews, in addition to local and national newspaper clippings and internet sites, we study two processes of regional carnivore management (Nordland, Norway and Jämtland, Sweden). We explore how different forms of knowledge have been mobilized, reproduced, transferred and legitimized in policies and regulations in these two processes. Furthermore, we examine the interplay between scientific and experience-based knowledge at different levels and scales in both countries. In Norway, “clear zoning” has been established as a basic management instrument to achieve national “population goals” for carnivores. We show how the locally situated knowledge – in our account represented through the Regional Large Carnivore Committee (RLCC), which includes political parties’ and Sami Parliament representatives – experiences real barriers by being overruled by the national Ministry of Climate and Environment, 2016 in their process of revising the carnivore management plan (CMP). In Sweden where the management of large carnivores is devolved to regional authorities and stakeholder-based Wildlife Management Delegations (WMDs), attempts to regionally solve conflicts are often overthrown by the national environmental protection agency or through court cases initiated by the environmental movement. Hence, compromises that potentially could solve conflicts are undermined. The analysis shows that while carnivore governance in both countries are founded on decentralized management authority at the regional level, local actors struggle for their views, experiences and knowledge to be acknowledged and counted as valid in the management process. While the decentralized management model opens for inclusion of different knowledge systems, this system has yet to acknowledge the challenges of knowledge being dismissed or marginalized across governance levels and scales.

Collaborative governance approaches have been suggested as strategies to handle wicked environmental problems. Evaluations have found promising examples of effective natural resource governance, but also highlighted the importance of social-ecological context and institutional design. The aim of this study was to identify factors that contribute to the achievement of social and ecological sustainability within Swedish moose (Alces alces) management. In 2012, a multi-level collaborative governance regime was implemented to decrease conflicts among stakeholders. We carried out semi-structured interviews with six ‘good examples’ (i.e., Moose Management Groups that showed positive social and ecological outcomes). We found that ‘good examples’ collectively identified existing knowledge gaps and management challenges and used their discretionary power to develop procedural arrangements that are adapted to the social-ecological context, their theory of change, and attributes of local actors. This contributed to the creation of bridging social capital and principled engagement across governance levels. Thus, our results indicate the existence of higher-order social learning as well as a positive feedback from within-level collaboration dynamics to between-level collaboration. Furthermore, our study illustrates the importance of institutional flexibility to utilize the existing knowledge across stakeholder groups and to allow for adaptations based on the social learning process.

Frontline bureaucrats are positioned at the interface between citizens and the state. They convert political resolution into action and in effect form the core of many public decisions through interaction and communication with both the recipients of those decisions and upper management levels that initiate them. However, dilemmas often arise when frontline bureaucrats attempt to translate political goals and strategies into local administrative praxis. The case of large carnivore management in Sweden will be used to demonstrate the insuperable difficulties that can arise when managers simultaneously need to balance the bureaucratic tasks of planning, executing, and evaluating performed decisions with attending to calls for increased responsiveness to public values in order to improve the delivery of service. This responsiveness is typically reflected through the new principles of public participation and collaboration, which are added to the bureaucracy to support the integration of broader sets of interests, experiences, and knowledge. In such an environment, the work of frontline managers becomes even more crucial in order to balance and align policy goals with the need to enhance public involvement. Our study reveals that in striving to meet the formal policy requirement to implement and lead collaboration (which in turn creates the central dilemma that concerns us here) managers develop strategies to secure effectiveness rather than responsiveness. Actually, they have few possibilities to do, otherwise when the latest policy edict clearly instructs the authorities to oversee the effective implementation and achievement of goals, leaving little opportunity to pursue genuine collaboration.

Wild ungulates play a key role in the management and governance of Swedish wildlife. They are primarily harvested for meat, but are also important for non-consumptive uses of wildlife such as recreation. However, due to browsing and crop raiding, ungulates also reduce the forest's economic value and make it difficult for farmers to maintain agricultural practices. While current policies and regulations clearly indicate that wildlife is to be treated as a valuable, others may disagree. This setting provided an opportunity to study the search for mutually acceptable outcomes and working relationships in parallel to the state-regulated management arrangements. The shared and disputed issues in the studied case echo the broader issues of entitlement to resources and value transformation that can stabilise but also disturb or even disrupt environmental management. The diverging interests, claims and experiences of forestry, hunting, farming, recreation, and protection, expressed in their own voices and consolidated into narratives about land, land use, and rights and obligations, can be seen as an important driver of collective action. The connections between the experiences of and the dynamics behind the decision to collaborate reveal a contested space in which the commercial wood industries, agriculture, the decentralised state, conservation, and recreational interests are all involved and must negotiate with one-another to secure their interests. The participants justify their actions symbolically, referring to an idiom of rights, the construct of forestry's importance for the public good, and the desire to be resourceful and authoritative outside the framework of state action.