Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses findings from Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature, a three-year project in Sheffield, UK. It shows how policies to promote wellbeing of humans and 'nature' are muted through decision-making rhetorics that box environmental imaginaries within neoliberal governance models.

Paper long abstract:

The interrelationship of human and 'natural' environments underpins the quest for sustainable development. Yet the understanding of human interdependence with a healthy planetary environment that is the foundation for sustainability discourses is not matched by investment in the provision, care and animation of natural spaces in the cities where human impacts are concentrated.

Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN) is a multi-disciplinary investigation of these interrelationships in the city of Sheffield, UK. One strand of the project focuses on translations between academic research and situated practice, working with stakeholders to understand how urban nature is seen to create the conditions for wellbeing, and how these understandings intersect with the logics of funding and investment.

Analysing emerging findings from this project and drawing on scholarship on everyday 'institutional work' (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) this paper exposes the mismatch between holistic logics of wellbeing and an austerity agenda that demands short-term cash savings to the public purse as the price for investment in the natural environment. It shows how arguments in favour of wellbeing and quality of life are muffled through rhetorics of legitimacy (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) that box environmental imaginaries within neoliberal models of governance and participation.

Lawrence, T. B., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work. In S. R. Clegg et al (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organisation studies (pp. 215-254). London: SAGE.

Suddaby, R., & Greenwood, R. (2005). Rhetorical strategies of legitimacy. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(1), 35-67.