Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

An Analysis of Beliefs About Environmental Governance and Connection to Environmental Services and Disservices

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  • The natural environment provides important services and benefits to peoples’ health and lives. Conversely, environmental disservices can have negative impacts on humans such as through pollution, chemical toxins, and climate change. The combination of environmental services and disservices encompass how human health and wellbeing, and the environment are connected. As a result of connections with the environment, humans are integrally tied to the natural environment via reciprocal feedback between social and ecological systems. The services, benefits, and disservices of the natural environment, along with concerns about their distribution, are a main reason why people include the environment in governance strategies. Environmental governance is one of the key ways in which society influences both environmental health and individuals. The success and legitimacy of governance efforts are predicated on the allotment of entitlements to the governed and their overall quality of life because of those efforts. Good governance measures indicators that directly impact the quality of life of those governed. Good governance can increase individual wellbeing and influence how people perceive the quality of that governance. The connections between human wellbeing and governance have partially contributed to increasing demand for measuring how well-off people are using governance perceptions or beliefs as indicators. Beliefs are the mental acceptance of ideas an individual believes to be true. Governing systems and institutions can act on beliefs through management actions such as budgeting and through allocation of services. Beliefs regarding governance legitimacy are correlated most strongly with measures of trust in information, fairness of outcomes, and confidence in institutional performance. Puget Sound, in northwest Washington state, is leading the way in terms of introducing measures of beliefs about environmental governance in its restoration agenda. Indicators were created to measure beliefs about governance including measuring effective government, trust in government, democratic engagement/open participation, leadership/equity, access, communication, collaboration, and transparency. Using previously developed indicators of beliefs about environmental governance in Puget Sound, this dissertation tested the connection between beliefs about environmental governance and environmental services and disservices. I examined the association of frequency of psychologically restorative experiences, and the role of place attachment as a mediator on beliefs about environmental governance. Place attachment was significantly associated with governance perceptions, but explained only a small portion of variance (R2 = .02), whereas psychological restoration was significantly associated with place attachment and explained 37% of its variance (R2 = .37). Place attachment fully mediated the effects of frequency of psychological restoration on beliefs about governance. This dissertation also examined the spatial distribution of beliefs about environmental governance across Puget Sound as well as correlations of beliefs about environmental governance with specific ecosystem services and disservices using partial cross-correlation. Results indicate local scale heterogeneity exists within the Puget Sound region of beliefs about environmental governance. Bird diversity and tree cover were negatively correlated with environmental governance beliefs, whereas health disparity metrics were positively correlated with environmental governance beliefs. These connections indicate more positive governance beliefs in areas of poorer environmental health. Finally, this dissertation examined whether change in environmental services over time, as measured by green space, is significantly spatially associated with beliefs about environmental governance and its predictive patterns using geographically weighted regression to explore spatial non-stationarity. In Puget Sound, there is a significant relationship between change in green space as measured by increase in impervious surface and decrease in tree cover, and what people believe about environmental governance. Overall, this dissertation worked toward understanding the general trends and patterns of beliefs about environmental governance in Puget Sound and how they relate to ecosystem service and disservices. This work can help to inform environmental managers and planners about the state of beliefs about environmental governance and how they could develop strategies to improve environmental service management and distribution. Even though beliefs about environmental governance may relate to the environment or individual psychological attachments to it, these relationships are small at best and are not a large driver of individual beliefs about environmental governance.
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  • Research was funded by an EPA STAR early career award to Biedenweg #83694601.
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