Environmental decision-making in climate and nature tends to foreground economic, technical and scientific perspectives, knowledges and strategies. Building on Murphy’s (2024) call for a ‘diverse world of caring places’, this project aimed to elaborate a socioecological care approach for building better people-planet relations. 

Care in this sense is an ethical-political position, emphasising relationships and interdependencies, highlighting the importance of everyday caring practices as well dispositional characteristics like love, respect and solidarity. This has transformative potential because a socioecological care approach will foreground marginalised standpoints, draw attention to un/caring actions and how these are linked, the contexts in which care is possible or not, and in/equalities within caring relations (Tronto, 2013).

By bringing together academic social scientists, community-based co-researchers and musicians, this project sought to:

• co-produce a shared understanding and language of socioecological care that connects social science knowledge with lived experiences in communities
• test qualitative research methods for investigating and expanding socioecological care
  build skills, capacities and confidence in communities around socioecological care in action
• produce three explanatory case studies of socioecological care highlighting related challenges and opportunities
• explore, evolve and promote socioecological care through newly composed Scottish music, involving young people

This website hosts the outputs from this project. 

This work has been supported by the following funders:

• ACCESS Network (Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science) Flex Fund. ACCESS is a five-year initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
• The Cairngorms National Park through the Cairngorms 2030 programme, made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery Players.
• Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration fund.