Global Environmental Values and Local Contexts of Action

The effects of environmental change on individuals and societies are receiving increasing attention. Local, national and international organisations are all undertaking research and developing policy on environmental management and regulation. This level of concern appears, initially, to indicate a positive and growing awareness of human-environment interactions. However, it is not clear that in developing agenda for action the different parties are in fact referring to the same `environment', nor that the meanings of environmental concepts are understood in the same ways by `experts' and `non-experts'. The paper examines this issue in two ways. First, the authors consider the diversity of referents which accompany the concept of the environment in academic, policy, business and lay discourses. Second, they discuss some of the ways in which individuals who encounter environmental change at the local level employ the concept of `the environment' differently in order to achieve political ends. The discussion and the data upon which it is based are used to indicate the ways that `global' environmental concepts are localised in specific contexts of action. Finally, the authors argue that the complexity of the discursive frameworks, together with the absence of enduring, coherent environmental value systems within which to situate perspectives on environmental change, implies that frameworks for environmental understanding and action cannot be imposed from outside of the contexts in which goals, values and motives are embedded.