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Abstract

The world faces a social-ecological crisis, and human-shared places such as cities, towns, farms, and industrial areas are at the frontlines. Resolving this crisis will require creative solutions that target these human-shared places. Participatory, transdisciplinary approaches to research and practice can be useful for developing such solutions, but they are also complicated by divergent ontological views, systems of power and oppression, accessibility barriers, and other factors. This dissertation contributes both theoretical and practical insights, asking: How can we effectively and ethically integrate plural knowledge systems into conservation of human-shared places? Chapter 2 is a perspective paper that offers a transdisciplinary theoretical framework for “ecological wellbeing” to ground urban conservation work and explores how such an approach might strengthen responses to wicked urban ecology problems. Chapter 3 involves a discourse analysis of four applied rewilding projects, tapping into ongoing debate about ambiguity of the term “rewilding”. We found flexible interpretations confirming that rewilding can be understood as a “boundary object”, and we discuss how including diverse perspectives may bring benefits in addition to the recognized risks. Chapters 4 and 5 report on lessons from an experimental future visioning workshop that sought to embrace epistemic pluralism. Chapter 4 analyzes debrief interviews with workshop participants, discussing what factors affected participants’ subjective experiences of inclusion and willingness to contribute from their varied epistemic perspectives. Lastly, Chapter 5 is an instructional guide for conducting such normative future visioning workshops. We share findings from autoethnographic reflection and participant interviews in a step-by-step toolkit intended for general, scholarly, and practitioner audiences. The findings from this dissertation contribute to the science and practice of sustainability transitions by highlighting levers for supporting epistemic pluralism and transdisciplinarity in applied work.