World Café Day Three Morning (R1)

Children’s right to the city: Challenging technological, institutional and mental infrastructures
António Ferreira

It is widely accepted today that societies should be child friendly. It is also widely accepted that mobility plays a key role in determining how children, and people in general, perceive and inhabit the world around them. This means that a key component of child-friendly societies is necessarily concerned with children´s mobility patterns. However, and despite the differences experienced across distinct geographical areas and social groups, car-based mobility has become dominant. As a result, children have lost much of their physical and political autonomy in contemporary urban public spaces. This perverse situation is a partial result of a poorly conceived, yet widely adopted, technocratic conception of risk that unequivocally serves the interests of the automotive industry and the technological innovators that keep such industry flourishing against all odds. This conceptualization entails that risk can be objectively measured and that children should be surveilled, controlled, and protected from harm in the ways ‘scientifically’ determined by technical experts. In practice, this forces children to remain confined to protective bubbles that alienate them from urban public spaces and – in the long run – induces them to reproduce the automobilities that shaped their formative years. Challenging this situation requires a deep revision of the disabling technological, institutional, and mental infrastructures that have become dominant in contemporary societies. Techno-centric decision-making processes conducted by adult-experts aimed at promoting numbing safety, efficiency and optimized mobilities could therefore be replaced by participative processes where adults and children, public authorities and schools, technological innovators and educators work together in transformative contexts that empower both adults and children as embodied political beings. While acknowledging that much depends on non-democratic choices made in macro-level political economy settings, this presentation concludes with an empirically informed discussion about the mental infrastructures that hold back this much-needed transformation.Well-Being and Sustainability Transformations: What to Measure?
Jonathan MorrisThe premise of economic growth is to provide means to contribute to improved quality of life. However, the pursuit of economic growth has come at a cost of environmental challenges, resource depletion and societal challenges, while also deliver benefits in an unequal manner. Delivering economic progress that is environmentally sustainable and societally just requires changing the primary focus on growing the economy, and instead to consider more holistic measures of societal, environmental and economic well-being. Expanding beyond a narrow focus on GDP and income measures has led to the development of numerous indicators as well as global goals and targets, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, there lacks a suitable set of indicators which can measure the transformation and progress towards a well-being oriented economy. Drawing on measures and indicators created to measure quality of life in the European Union, and progress against Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-Being). The European Union’s Statistical Authority (EUROSTAT) publishes data covering the cross-cutting theme of quality of life, as well as different components of SDG. Using data for 2018 covering 27 countries and 40 quality of life/well-being indicators, this research performs principal components analysis, and correlation analysis to highlight patterns between well-being indicators and identify key priority indicators which can inform policy makers. Emerging findings highlight that while average income measures remain strongly correlated to many quality of life and SDG 3 indicators, it is perceived health which is strongly linked to overall life satisfaction. Future research will advance these datasets further to develop indicators for public policy at sub-national and regional levels to identify spatial variations in well-being in order to transform policy-making towards a well-being economy, and provide the empirical base for measuring sustainability and well-being transformations and policy success.A social-ecological perspective to facilitate transformations towards human-wildlife coexistence
Ine Dorresteijn

Wildlife species, such as the wolf, lynx and wild boar, are making a comeback in Europe. This comeback is creating novel types of human-wildlife interactions and conflicts, especially in regions where wildlife has been absent for long periods of time. To navigate the wildlife comeback there is often a desire to transform human-wildlife interactions towards low-conflict coexistence between wildlife and people. A promising way forward is to view human-wildlife conflict as the result of a co-adaptive process. Co-adaptation specifies the important roles of both ecological drivers (e.g. wildlife distributions and behaviour) and social drivers (e.g. human values & tolerance, and conflicts between stakeholders). A co-adaptation perspective also suggests that over time, humans and wildlife can adapt to changes in their social-ecological environment. Here, we present an ongoing social-ecological project on human-wildlife conflicts in the Czech and Slovak Western Carpathians. This region experiences increasing human-wildlife conflicts due to human expansion, land development, and the comeback of large carnivores and wild boar. In this presentation we will focus on the social drivers. We found that attitudes towards carnivores changed over the past decade in parallel to changing social-ecological circumstances. However, very diverse opinions on the wildlife comeback persisted in the region. For example, tolerant farmers regularly recognized relational values or beneficial regulating Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs), while less tolerant farmers often identified negative regulating NCPs such as wildlife-induced damage. Values also played a role in stakeholder cooperation. While different stakeholder groups clashed over wolf protection and the appropriate management of wild boar, cooperation between stakeholders was facilitated by similar policy-related beliefs on problem framing conflict solutions. We will discuss the relevance of our results on the drivers of conservation conflicts and the need to resolve tensions for further steps in the project to support a transformation towards low-conflict coexistence.