Conference Agenda

Geotagged social media data offer a valuable tool for identifying nature tourism hotspots and monitoring human-wildlife interactions. Previous studies have demonstrated the utility of hashtags in detecting popular tourist areas linked to wildlife, such as seal haul-out sites, both within and beyond designated Special Areas of Conservation (Mancini et al., 2018). Similarly, data mining techniques have been used to monitor recreational activities like fishing, providing insights into fisher behaviours and fish populations (Monkman et al., 2018). Integrating social media analytics with ecological monitoring presents a novel approach for assessing ecotourism’s impact on charismatic megafauna, such as seals and seal tourism.

This study analyses georeferenced Instagram© posts from 2014 to 2023 within the Ythan Estuary catchment, Aberdeenshire. The area lies within the Forvie National Nature Reserve, a protected and ecologically significant coastal site in Scotland, adjacent to Newburgh Seal Beach, a popular recreational area. Using hashtag analysis and data mining techniques, we examine whether visitor motivations, personal significance, and proximity to the site can be quantified from social media activity. Given the estuary’s history of human recreation, its growing seal population, and its designation as a critical seal habitat, this location provides a compelling case study for evaluating the sustainability of seal tourism.

We specifically extracted posts referencing seals to assess their relationship with visitor motivations and proximity patterns. Temporal trends in posting behaviour were analysed to determine the impact of the 2017 seal haul-out protection measures and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic on visitor activity and social media engagement.

Much of the environmental movement in the US is shaped by grassroots organizations working alongside communities, research institutions, and governmental agencies. This creates localized networks for environmental stewardship across the country, which may be shaped by both shared national and international forces and also unique region-specific circumstances. This raises the question of how local environmental stewardship networks are different and alike. Are there phenomena that are unique to environmental stewardship networks and how do they resemble other more widely studied organizational networks? Here, we analyze eight different collaborative environmental stewardship networks, representing eight US cities and regions, within eight different US states across the country. We employ exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to model each network and compare and contrast the forces at play within each one. The networks range in size from 44 organizations to 1,313 organizations, with an average of 324. We use data collected through various rounds of the USDA Forest Service’s Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP), which has been conducted since 2007 and has been replicated in over a dozen cities globally. Preliminary results have shown a shared propensity for anti-preferential attachment and high mutuality, while cities differ on effects for both organizational focus and type. This work helps us understand local environmentalism broadly within the US context and can provide evidence for how environmental stewardship efforts scale with size, population, urbanization, and more.

Power has increasingly been integrated into institutional analysis to explain behavior, interactions, and outcomes in environmental governance. Yet, actor-focused theories of power do not fully capture the influences, hierarchies, and power relations that span multiple decision-making situations, and the power that actors exert via powerful linked situations. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers graph theoretic measures to quantify different relationships and examine power relations among nodes based on their structural connections. This paper leverages a multimode network approach and a nascent power typology from institutional analysis to theorize and assess interdependences between situations and actors as two forms of power: ‘power-over’ and ‘power-to’. We describe ´power over’ as situation-centered pragmatic, framing, and design power, manifested via AS linkages of biophysical transactions, information, and institutions, respectively. ‘Power-to’ is theorized as the capacity of actors to exert influences, determined by their involvement in situations (membership). We operationalize these NAS concepts via multimode motifs that assess the extent of ‘power-over’ situations and ‘power-to’ actors. The framework is applied to examine deforestation outcomes of the Indonesian palm oil value chain. Data sources include semi-structured interviews with 16 policy actors, supplemented by secondary datasets from peer-reviewed and media articles. Among 11 delineated situations, policymaking and certification situations exert substantial design power, whereas global market, discourse, and monitoring situations manifest significant framing power. We note the interplay between design power by the Indonesian policymaking and framing power by the global market, reinforcing the growth-centered expansion of oil palm plantations. Among 22 aggregated actor typologies, producing companies, NGOs, and the Indonesian government demonstrate high ‘power-to’, stemming from their participation not only in the greatest number of decision-making situations, but also the ones exerting substantial ‘power-over’.

Scientific research on climate change emphasizes carbon performance (CP) as essential to sustainable management. The framework examines business greenhouse gas emissions from environmental restrictions and public expectations. CP has been explored for pollution monitoring and financial incentives like carbon credits, but sociological knowledge of corporate networks as sustainability advocates is lacking. This study examines CP through the lens of corporate centrality, defined as a company’s position based on its connectivity and influence within a network. It analyzes different types of centralities in Mexican corporations, employing social network analysis (SNA) and metrics such as degree, closeness, eigenvector, and betweenness centrality. The research focuses on networks of shared board members (board interlocks) and the carbon emissions reported by these companies. Using a symmetric undirected matrix to account for board interlock connections, our findings reveal whether companies with higher centrality implement more effective sustainability practices, positioning them as key nodes for disseminating emission reduction strategies. Furthermore, the study aims to identify the challenges faced by peripheral companies, which, despite having less influence, exhibit greater flexibility to adopt innovative approaches. This research offers theoretical and practical frameworks to improve business sustainability plans and highlights the significance of network dynamics in advancing low-carbon economies. The findings enhance the domain of business management and sustainability, emphasizing the significance of collaboration and leadership in addressing climate change. The report provides pragmatic ideas for formulating public policies and business initiatives that enhance the role of core enterprises and promote sustainable development.