Dissertation Using Systems Approaches to Understand Women's Conservation Leadership and Urban Residents' Wildscape Behavior
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DISSERTATION USING SYSTEMS APPROACHES TO UNDERSTAND WOMEN’S CONSERVATION LEADERSHIP AND URBAN RESIDENTS’ WILDSCAPE BEHAVIOR Submitted by Megan Siobhán Jones Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources In partial fulfilment of the requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Spring 2020 Doctoral Committee: Advisor: Jennifer Solomon Co-Advisor: Tara L. Teel Michael Gavin Doreen E. Martinez Copyright Megan Siobhán Jones 2020 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT USING SYSTEMS APPROACHES TO UNDERSTAND WOMEN’S CONSERVATION LEADERSHIP AND URBAN RESIDENTS’ WILDSCAPE BEHAVIOR This dissertation seeks to investigate a fundamental question in the field of conservation science: How do we build and sustain capacity for conservation leadership and action to protect biodiversity in a changing world? Worldwide, conservation practitioners seek to make conservation accessible to more people embedded in highly variable social-ecological contexts, but their efforts are often hindered by the characteristics of the systems (e.g. communities, institutions) they are embedded within. Fulfilling the aspirations of conservation will require broader participation from a greater diversity and number of conservation actors. Achieving this expansion of the conservation community will depend on our ability to understand how individuals’ actions and leadership are nested within the broader systems that these individuals respond to and seek to reshape. In the three studies of this dissertation I therefore seek to understand the behavior and motivations of conservation leaders and actors through a systems approach, by investigating the experiences of different groups of practitioners who challenge and reconfigure the inherited model of how conservation occurs. In my first tWo research studies I explore the experiences of women, one of many groups that have historically been excluded from and marginalized in leadership positions. Specifically, I investigate women conservation leaders’ perceptions of professional gender-related and motherhood-related challenges and supports. In Chapter 2 I find that women in conservation leadership in the United States experience at least six categories of gender-related challenges over their careers, which fall more ii heavily on different women based on race, ethnicity, age, and seniority. I find further that Women navigate those challenges with the help of structural and relational supports. In Chapter 3 I examine how the intersection of motherhood and conservation leadership creates a series of choices for individual women, and that these choices are constrained or enabled by the families, organizations, and profession within which they work and live. In my final research study, reported in Chapter 4, I investigate the factors motivating urban residents who are expanding the scope of conservation leadership through voluntary engagement in and advocacy for wildscape gardening on their properties and in their communities. I determine that residents participating in an urban conservation program engage in many different, interconnected wildscaping behaviors, and are motivated to do so by a variety of individual and collective factors. My findings further suggest that these factors change over time in response to feedbacks from the impacts that Wildscape gardeners’ actions have on a complex multilevel social-ecological system. The findings from these studies shed light on how conservation can benefit from systems approaches to become a more sustainable and inclusive movement in different contexts, so as to better fulfill its vision of protecting equitable, biodiverse social-ecological systems. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is what it is because of the encouragement, dedication, incisive questioning, and thoughtful consideration of many people. My heartfelt thanks to my co- advisors, Jen and Tara, for enthusiastically and compassionately steWarding me through the transition from my master’s program and through the years of my PhD, for helping me work through thorny problems, and for opening doors to neW and exciting opportunities. Thanks to my internal committee member, Mike, for your insightful editing and wise counseling, and for role modeling what it means to be an excellent scientist and professor. Thanks to my outside committee member, Doreen, for your unstinting generosity, for pushing me to understand the World in neW ways, and for alWays believing I could do more and better. I couldn’t have done this without my family, especially my parents, my partner Jonathan, and my friends across the US and UK, all of whom gave me countless hours of their love and intelligence that helped me hold on to my excitement, purposefulness, and sense of proportion. Thanks to my graduate student community – Leeann Sullivan, Kristin Hoelting, Rina Hauptfeld, Kevin Jablonski, Bethlehem Abebe, Xoco Shinbrot, Mikko Jimenez, Hannah Love, Sarah Walker, Katie Powlen, my writing group (Cara Steger, Tomas Pickering, Arianna Punzalan), the GWIS officers, and many more – who kept me connected, energized, and balanced. Thanks to the professors who’ve taught me and helped me grow as a researcher, teacher, and person, especially Caridad Souza, Jeff Snodgrass, Dan Graham, Kim Henry, Silvia Canetto, Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, and Tobi Jacobi. Thanks to the mentors who are such amazing role models and colleagues, and who are helping me cultivate projects and ideas that emerged from this iv dissertation – Leela Hazzah, Becky Niemiec, Colleen Begg, and all the women involved in Women for the Environment Africa. Thanks to Jen Solomon for securing my teaching assistantship and the grant that funded the women’s leadership study, and to the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources department for providing the funding for that assistantship and study. Thanks to the Garden Club of America, the Colorado Chapter of The Wildlife Society, Audubon Rockies and the Environmental Protection Agency for funding the wildscape study. Thanks to Jamie Weiss, my collaborator at Audubon Rockies, from whom I’ve learned so much about how to do conservation outreach with exuberance, adaptability, and warmth. Thanks to all the 63 women conservation leaders who participated in the intervieWs – I will alWays be grateful for your trust and time. Thanks to the gardeners who participated in wildscaping intervieWs and welcomed me into their homes, and to the other Wildscape Ambassadors who attended events and took the survey. Thanks as well to the scholars and scientists too numerous to name whose work provided inspiration, insight, and grounding for this dissertation. And of course, thanks to the birds, lichens, rocks, pines, cottonwoods, mountains, clouds and skies of Colorado, who keep quietly reminding me of the love that keeps us doing this work. v TABLE OF CONTEXTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF KEYWORDS .................................................................................................................. X Chapter One: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 1. Introduction to this Dissertation ................................................................................... 1 2. Research Epistemology ................................................................................................ 4 Research with Applied Relevance ................................................................ 4 Values-Based Science ................................................................................... 6 Systems Thinking .......................................................................................... 8 Interdisciplinarity .......................................................................................... 9 3. Positionality Statement .............................................................................................. 10 4. OvervieW of the Three Research Chapters ................................................................ 13 Chapter TWo: Challenges and Supports for Women Conservation Leaders ................................ 15 1. OvervieW .................................................................................................................... 15 2. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 15 3. Methods ...................................................................................................................... 19 Data Collection ........................................................................................... 19 Data Analysis .............................................................................................. 20 4. Results ........................................................................................................................ 20 Participant Characteristics .......................................................................... 21 Gender-Related