Beth F. T. Brockett

While the physical and mental health benefits of greenspace exposure are well documented, ethnic minority communities in the United Kingdom continue to engage with these environments at disproportionately lower rates. This persistent disparity points to an oversight in existing literature, specifically regarding how these communities navigate everyday encounters with nature. This qualitative study employs interviews and diary methods to explore the restorative processes, motivations and preferences of ethnic minority residents in Bristol, United Kingdom. By communicating these experiences through the novel approach of composite narratives, the research endeavours to situate lived realities within intersectional contexts, ensuring the findings remain nuanced and resistant to essentialist assumptions. Our findings reveal that engagement with nature is a purposeful element of daily life, with psychological restoration serving as a conscious and instrumental strategy for well‐being. Distinct preferences revealed a range of landscape typologies, including blue spaces, urban woodlands and family‐oriented parks, while a range of constraints to engagement and visitation were also present. Using composite narratives further illuminates the role of social relationships in shaping greenspace experiences, highlighting a tension between positive experiences and overlapping constraints. While participants negotiate challenges that are both universal and culturally specific, these obstacles do not simply override restorative encounters; instead, they form a constellation that evolves across multiple scales. This study demonstrates that, despite these constraints, urban greenspaces remain vital resources for these communities. The findings underscore the necessity of enhancing everyday access for those who need it most, living in densely populated or low‐income urban areas. By developing safe, welcoming environments and including communities in environmental planning, we can instil more equitable approaches to provision that enhance well‐being for all urban residents. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Agricultural landscapes represent critical contexts for advancing policy objectives related to tree cover expansion. This paper explores how farmers' values influence their willingness or ability to grow trees on farms. Research is based on 49 interviews and two focus groups with farmers in England and draws on two social science research traditions to devise an analytical framework based on four value orientations—instrumental, relational, expressive and intrinsic. Analysing the data through the lens of these value orientations reveals how tree growing both aligns with and diverges from farmers' values. While growing trees is not a primary occupational goal for most farmers, neither is it inconsistent with the worldviews of farmers navigating the realities of an agricultural landscape increasingly oriented towards the provision of public goods. Instrumental values, particularly economic considerations, play a prominent role in farmers' decisions about growing trees. However, relational and expressive dimensions—including affiliations with particular trees, landscape aesthetics and opportunities for personal fulfilment—significantly shape farmers' perspectives. Intrinsic values, linked to an appreciation for the natural world and the farming way of life, further enrich these dynamics. Policy and practice implications . Our findings emphasise the importance of engaging with the full spectrum of values that underpin farmers' decision‐making about trees. The four value orientations provide a framework for understanding where, how and why trees matter to farmers. Policymakers and practitioners can use this framework to align initiatives, communications and support mechanisms with farmers' priorities, fostering greater integration of trees into agricultural landscapes. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

People from all sections of society should feel welcome and included to enjoy greenspaces. However, people from ethnic minority backgrounds may experience exclusionary practices and discriminatory processes, limiting their access, enjoyment, and benefits from such spaces. This paper aims to address these issues through an in-depth qualitative study exploring how 53 individuals from UK ethnic minority backgrounds residing in Bristol perceive and experience exclusion in UK greenspaces. Going beyond narratives that pathologise the exclusion of ethnic minorities from greenspaces, this research reveals a spectrum of experiences related to perceived exclusion, including both positive and negative, and challenges and expressions of empowerment and agency. Common experiences of exclusion are often intangible, necessitating sensitivity to their elusive and relational nature, with variation between urban and rural contexts. Drawing on Bourdieusian theories of practice, this study illuminates how social and cultural capital, habitus, and symbolic violence shape exclusionary practices and discriminatory processes, contributing to feelings of otherness, discomfort among UK ethnic minority group members in greenspaces. By highlighting the diverse nature of these processes and their variations across social and geographic contexts, this study emphasises the need for tailored, coproduced interventions to enhance greenspace accessibility and engagement. It advocates for recognising diverse experiences, integrating critical thought into environmental planning, and leveraging social and cultural capital to promote inclusivity and address systemic inequalities.

What leads some farmers to dramatically increase the number of trees on their land? What role do social and cultural values play? And how do values and behaviour interact? This Research Note presents accounts from four farms which have substantially increased tree cover, foregrounding the farmers’ stories to focus on the role social and cultural values […]

Building upon the concept of mainstreaming social sciences within conservation, we consider their mainstreaming, and so integration, within UK environment policy and practice (EPP) organisations. The paper responds to increasing calls to recognise the essential role of social sciences in addressing global environmental crises across policy, practice and research. An actor-oriented approach was deployed, producing empirical information from a multi-stage, co-designed, collaborative study involving 19 social scientists from a range of EPP organisations, to understand how they experience the mainstreaming of social sciences. The findings contribute to debates about the politics of knowledge in organisational domains other than those focused on research, specifically EPP organisations. Evidence was found of recent positive changes in how social sciences are perceived, resourced and utilised within EPP, as well as examples of positive impact. However, although EPP organisations are recognising the opportunities that social sciences expertise brings, in practice social sciences still face barriers to effective integration. Many of the challenges faced by the social sciences within academic multi-discipline research (e.g., late, narrow, or selective enrolment) were also experienced in EPP organisations, along with some unique challenges. Informed by the findings, the paper proposes a set of integration indicators designed to assess organisational progress toward addressing the observed challenges. It is recommended that these indicators are employed at a strategic level by EPP organisations seeking to better integrate social sciences expertise into their work.

As calls grow for relational approaches to nature and wellbeing research that consider reciprocity in human‐environment interactions, the concept of affordances is gaining importance as a useful way of thinking about nature experiences. Affordances provide a framework to enable individualised conceptions of nature by focusing on what is functionally meaningful to people. However, affordance thinking is currently limited in its ability to help us understand how peoples' background, culture and circumstances shape interactions with nature ‐ a critical issue with respect to inclusivity and the under‐representation of some sections of society. Bourdieu's theory of practice is a well‐established set of ‘thinking tools’ which potentially help addresses these influences. It examines how our social environment may pattern our practices, attitudes, and perceptions. In this paper, we review the various applications of affordances before providing an overview of how Bourdieu's concepts of habitus , capital and field can complement, and be integrated with, affordance thinking for novel applications to greenspace research. Bridging these areas of thinking will facilitate development of a more intersectional and complete understanding of nature experiences, including the quality and inclusivity of green and natural spaces.