A heady witch's brew of globalisation and consumerism is set to overwhelm the planet, exhausting our natural resources and disinheriting future generations.
Here Dr Rick Worrell of the World Wildlife Fund Scotland explores the alternatives.
In the modern day, 'rights' are things which have tended to become very well defined. Responsibilities, on the other hand, have had relatively little attention. Most would accept that a sense of responsibility to care for the interests of others, now and in the future, here and in the rest of the world, is deeply embedded in our personal and social psyches. It applies, amongst other things, to our care for nature and natural resources, often understood in the valuable but rather technocratic context of 'sustainable development'. Looking beyond this buzzword it is possible to see the broader, more colloquial and ethical concept of stewardship.
Stewards and stewardship
Farmers and landowners are often described as stewards or custodians of the countryside. As citizens, we are encouraged to be careful stewards of the nation's resources. The term "stewardship" appears in codes of practice, certification schemes, incentive schemes, and government policy. However, the term is rarely, if ever, described or developed in a useful way. Common themes which appear include: being entrusted to care for things, individual responsibility, acting on behalf of others, and a commitment to high environmental, economic and social standards.
But the stewardship concept could be used more, to engage people's sense of responsibility for the natural environment and motivate personal and collective action. During recent decades the management and use of natural resources in Scotland and elsewhere has been undergoing a fundamental evolution. Stewardship is a key term for advancing these issues, and needs to be part of the developing debate on resource use and ownership. It fills a critical void in our way of thinking about many of our interactions with natural resources.
There appears to be no widely recognised definition of stewardship. It is derived from 'sty-ward', someone who looks after farm animals, and has links with the term 'warden'. Historically, a steward was an official appointed to care for the administration of a household or lands.
In Scotland, the royal title 'Steward of Scotland' (or Seneschal and in Gaelic, Ard-Stiubhard) has been in use since the 14th century, reflecting a long tradition of guardianship on behalf of the public interest. More recently, stewardship has been used to describe a responsible approach to the task of caring for something on behalf of others. The term custodian, which has a similar meaning to steward, is sometimes used in relation to resource use.
A core meaning of stewardship is simply that people are entrusted with a responsibility to care for the community they belong to, for the land, and for other species. So stewardship has a strong emphasis on personal responsibility, which expresses our basic impulse to look after our surroundings. One important aspect of being responsible is taking account of the interests of others other people, future generations and other species.
Adoption of stewardship encourages everyone to see him or herself as a responsible member of the local community and wider society and therefore having some obligations as a member of those communities. As stewards, we all, whether owners, managers, or citizens, act not just for our own benefit, but also to increase the common good that is the sum of public and private benefits.
A traditional description of a steward involves someone being entrusted to look after the property of other people. Thus being a steward is also a privilege - and most people would agree that the responsibility of looking after natural resources on behalf of society has many positive aspects.
Stewardship is distinct from approaches to ownership and use of resources which are based purely on personal gain, expediency, or whim and which may be indifferent to other people and other species. Some basic beliefs which stewardship challenges are:
- land and natural resources can be treated in absolutely any way by an owner or manager
- other people/communities have no legitimate interests or rights relating to land or natural resources other than through their role as consumers of products
- other species and the natural world are merely resources which can be used by mankind without inhibition.
As stewards, we should all accept reasonable constraints on our freedom of action just as we do in many other aspects of life. While the basic principles of stewardship remain constant over time, their application in the form of personal action, standards and policies may change and evolve.
Who can be trusted?
The concept of stewardship applies in its widest sense to everyone. This is because, firstly, we all have interests and indeed some legal rights in the way that common resources are managed, and secondly, because all our actions have an influence on natural resources, so we are all responsible for them. Stewardship applies to several groups.
Citizens and communities can practice responsible stewardship. We all influence natural resources in a variety of ways hence the need for stewardship.
Natural resource managers are traditionally seen as looking after resources on behalf of the owners which is indeed what they do. In addition to this, they are now increasingly called on to protect and provide public and community benefits from those same properties. A major aspect of stewardship is to acknowledge a responsibility to deliver public as well as private benefits.
The legal owners of land and resources clearly have the strongest private legal rights, and often the greatest individual interest and the greatest responsibilities; therefore stewardship has strong messages for owners. Many owners would immediately accept that they are stewards on behalf of their children and heirs - who clearly have an interest in a property being passed onto them in good condition. Stewardship suggests a wider view than this, involving not just inheritors, but other people who have legitimate interests in how resources are cared for.
Government at various levels has an important role to play in stewardship. It can respond to civic society if the view is accepted that stewardship is a key concept of our time and therefore should appear in legislation and policy.
Interested parties The concept of stewardship involves the need to take into consideration all those with a legitimate "interest" in a resource; ie all those who are significantly affected by its management or use. Of course, it will be difficult to define these groups as the effects may be hard to identify.
It is useful to consider this in terms of three overarching groups:
1.People in the present time: members of both local and more distant communities are directly and indirectly affected by how land or resources are used. While many owners do take some account of other people's interests, the principles of stewardship suggest that this should become a universal and consistent practice.
2. Future generations of people: stewardship acknowledges the legitimate interests of future generations. We are grateful when past generations have created valuable assets for us and many of us feel that it is a good thing to pass these on to future generations. Sometimes, we even feel a sense of obligation to past generations to continue projects they have begun family farms are good examples of this. So stewardship considers the interests of past, present, and future generations.
3. Other species and the natural world: these interests centre on allowing wildlife to live and thrive without undue threat from people and on ensuring the welfare of domestic and wild animals .
Stewardship requires us to resolve some key issues of public interest in decision-making. How do we balance the interests of different groups of people? How do we prepare on behalf of future generations and other species when we cannot be sure what their interests might be? How do we balance the interests of people against those of other species? Stewardship provides the framework for considering these questions and developing the appropriate approaches for solving them.
Accountability
Stewardship involves some degree of accountability to wider interests than those represented by the owner or user, ie accountability to society, the public, the nation, the Crown, or God. Accountability to the public in the management and use of natural resources has become increasingly apparent and effective during this century, based on legislation and regulation.
For religious people, the concept of accountability to God is a powerful motivator and stewardship has a long tradition in Judeo-Christian thinking as in other religions too. Because stewardship relies on developing a sense of individual responsibility, accountability is less likely to be applied through burdensome regulation or compulsion and is far more likely to take the form of monitoring and working towards agreed standards.
Relationships Stewardship is different from management. The core meaning of natural resource management is simply the technical activity of producing products and services from the land and the oceans. As time has gone on, the role of managers has expanded to include many wider social and environmental concerns.
Stewardship is also different from sustainable management: Stewardship is an approach that informs how sustainable management will be accomplished, ie sustainability is an outcome of stewardship. It shares the core elements of sustainability, notably the focus on the interests of future generations and maintenance of natural and man-made capital. Stewardship adds several features to sustainable management, such as the interests of other species. Stewardship also incorporates the same wide view of public benefits which is central to sustainable management and sustainable development.
There is a relationship between stewardship and citizenship. Citizenship emphasises people's roles as part of a community and the need to collaborate for the good of a community. In its concern for the care and use of resources for the benefit of society, stewardship links closely with the wider concept of citizenship. This opens the way for a potentially fruitful synergy between stewardship and the promotion of good citizenship.
Stewardship and trusteeship are sometimes equated. However, trusteeship is relatively passive, involving simply keeping something (an estate, fund, collection) in a good condition for the benefit of a small number of beneficiaries. Stewardship is more active in the service of a wider range of interests.
Overview
Stewardship is a responsible approach to things one is entrusted to care for. It builds on a sense of personal responsibility. It involves taking into account the interests of others - other people, other communities, future generations, and other species. In the case of property, stewardship involves being entrusted to care for it on behalf of others, and means accepting some conditions on how property is used. Stewardship aims to deliver the "common good" - that is to say, public plus private interests - and it suggests some level of accountability for one's actions.
Stewardship is a key concept for reflecting the changed roles of owners and managers and citizens in the use of natural resources that have taken place in recent decades. The concept of stewardship applies in its widest sense to everyone because we all have interests in the way that land and natural resources are managed; and all our actions have an influence on natural resources. Outcomes of stewardship include: better decision-making, reduced reliance on regulation, generating a positive role for people and organisations, greater inclusiveness in the use of resources, and sustainable resource use.
|
