Cultivating capital: A practice-based approach to understanding communities within the Great Barrier Reef

Despite continued calls for environments to be governed as dynamic socioecological systems, conventional environmental management continues to imagine humans as operating separately from ecological processes, holding discrete, pre-given and self-evident interests in either using or protecting an environment's resources and services. This downplays the contingent, fluid and ambiguous connections that people actually practice within these systems, overlooking important nuance when it comes involving communities in the governance challenges and sociotechnical transitions provoked by climate change. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach using a comprehensive body of qualitative research conducted with communities living and working in proximity to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice, we examine our participants’ personal narratives about the Reef as accounts of participation in an overlapping set of social fields, tracing how these engagements involve different subjective dispositions, multiple interests, and the consolidation, mobilisation and cultivation of different types of capital. Our goal is to demonstrate the opportunities to be gained by practice-based approaches within environmental governance and the flexible, relational understandings of communities they offer. These understandings are imperative, we argue, when working to help communities negotiate complex change and build feasible and equitable environmental futures.