1. Introduction
The conventional public policy approach to pursuing social-ecological sustainability relies on institutions to externally motivate the necessary behavioural changes. However, the transaction costs of relying solely on this approach are normally prohibitive. This article expands on the argument that sustainability is ultimately feasible only as far as humans are also internally motivated to care about its attainment (Agrawal, 2003), acknowledging that other psychological processes also influence behaviour (Gifford, 2011).
Sustainability requires collective action (CA), which is often characterised as involving a commons or other type of social dilemma; i.e., a conflict between what is perceived best for a group and its members given the latters’ temptations to free ride on each others’ contributions (Poteete, Janssen, & Ostrom, 2010). Internal motivation of individuals to contribute manifests as what institutional analysts (e.g., Marshall & Malik, 2019) call civic virtue.
Compared to many indigenous worldviews (or ontologies), the salience of sustainability to humans in many contemporary societies is often diminished due to the Scientific Revolution ‘disenchanting’ us of ‘enchanted’ worldviews through which we experienced affective relations with the cosmos (Nature) and treated her as a nurturing mother (Merchant, 1990). This process started in western Europe but spread eventually to much of humanity. The modern, mechanistic worldview associated with this revolution understood the cosmos instead as anthropocentric with distinct human and nonhuman domains (Merchant, 1990). The salience of the latter domain (reduced to uncapitalised nature) to humans was thus diminished to the narrowed interests of our disenchanted selves
1.1 This Article
Given limited institutional capacities to externally motivate collective action for social-ecological sustainability, this article considers how organisation of this CA affects internal motivation (civic virtue) for contributing towards it. The argument builds on prior Bloomington-school commons scholarship that was influenced by self-determination theory in proposing that civic virtue for CA increases with greater support for our basic psychological needs. Community-based governance grounded in the subsidiarity principle (hereafter community-based governance) is argued to have advantages over other governance arrangements, including in re-enchanting human relations with Nature, for affording such support, and thus for strengthening civic virtue for CA towards sustainability. For any available level of institutional capacity to externally motivate pro-sustainability behaviours, therefore, organising CA for sustainability through community-based governance is concluded to enable greater sustainability than other governance arrangements. This focus intersects with post-growth scholarship (e.g., Soto-Oñate, Petrovics, & Bauwens, 2026) exploring the potential of community-based and other polycentric governance to facilitate the coordination needed for sustainability without undermining self-governance.
Building on vital contributions from Vincent Ostrom (particularly 1997), Elinor Ostrom (2000) and commons scholars following her lead (DeCaro, Janssen, & Lee, 2021; DeCaro & Stokes, 2008; Marshall, Hine, & East, 2017; Marshall & Malik, 2019) considered how civic virtue for sustainability could be strengthened by community-based and other polycentric forms of governance. The present article builds on this line of Bloomington-school institutional analysis, which incorporates key insights from social psychology’s self-determination theory (SDT) – one of the most widely researched and applied social-psychological theories (Ryan & Deci, 2019). SDT has informed a growing corpus of empirical research (e.g., Akers & Yasué, 2019; DeCaro, Janssen, & Lee, 2015; Epstein, 2017) around this topic.
The argument developed in this article is illustrated by the case of Australia’s government-sponsored Landcare initiative which seeks to promote self-reliance among rural landholders in working collectively to solve shared problems in sustaining their respective lands. The argument can be sketched as follows. Disenchantment of human relations with Nature led us to value her predominantly for instrumental reasons, thus weakening civic virtue to act with consideration for her wellbeing (section 2). Romanticism sought re-enchantment of these relations, and influenced Fikret Berkes (2018), a leading Bloomington-school commons scholar, in arguing for ecosystem governance to be grounded in a ‘sacred ecology’ worldview (section 3). Institutions promote civic virtue for CA the more they support humans in satisfying our basic psychological needs, including by enabling meaningful human exposure to Nature (section 4). Community-based institutional arrangements for governance have advantages over other arrangements in affording such support, and thus in promoting civic virtue (section 5). Community-based governance also has advantages over other governance arrangements in enabling meaningful human exposure to Nature, and thereby in strengthening our relatedness with her and growing civic virtue for CA towards her sustainability (section 6). Australia’s experience with the Landcare initiative illustrates the opportunities and challenges of community-based governance in supporting the basic needs including through Nature exposure, and thereby strengthening civic virtue for pursuing sustainability (section 7). For any given level of institutional capacity to externally motivate pro-sustainability behaviours, organising CA for sustainability through community-based governance can be expected to enable greater sustainability than other governance arrangements (section 8).
2. From Enchantment to Disenchantment
Pre-modern human societies perceived their worlds as ‘enchanted’, or animated, by spiritual or ‘supernatural’ forces. The boundary between the self and these worlds was experienced as somewhat porous: these were worlds of ‘magic’ (Taylor, 2007). Subjectivities of humans – ‘ways of perceiving, understanding, and relating to the world’ (Read, 2011 p. 114) – were thus relational. Human relations with Nature are fundamental in this understanding to our identity (Lejano, 2019).
Such enchanted worldviews understood self, society and cosmos as a single organism: Nature. This unity derived from conceiving the cosmos as alive and made wholly of animate parts. Identifying Nature as a nurturing mother imbued humans with internal motivation to act with consideration for her wellbeing. Although exploitation of Nature’s ‘resources’ increased over the ancient and early medieval eras, her image as a nurturing mother remained effective in restraining its scale and intensity (Merchant, 1990). Enchanted worldviews remain foundational meanwhile to many traditional indigenous belief systems and cultures (Berkes, 2018; Hartberg, Cox, & Villamayor-Tomas, 2016; Kimmerer, 2013; Malik, 2025; Watts, 2013).
Nature was not only viewed as nurturing in the pre-modern West. A contrary image of her as wild – responsible for floods, epidemics and chaos generally – also prevailed. Behind the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment was a drive to subdue this wildness. Key tenets of enchanted worldviews became delegitimised in mainstream discourse as they came to be displaced by the mechanistic philosophy which emerged dominant from classical physics (Merchant, 1990).
The modern, mechanistic worldview arising from this philosophy understood the cosmos (including humanity) as atomistic – comprised of unchanging parts – and the cosmos as the sum of these parts (Norgaard, 1994). Relationality of human subjectivities was thus assumed away, the self now seen as existing independently of its context. Nonhuman elements of the world became regarded as dead in the sense of inert or passive, leaving humans to be viewed anthropocentrically as separate from, and superior, to this world (nature). The cosmos was reconceived as a predictable machine available to be dominated by humans (Merchant, 1990).
The new worldview justified confidence inter alia that all phenomena could be understood by applying relatively few universal and discoverable basic principles, enabling local problems to be solved from afar through centralised governance (Norgaard, 1994). Such presumptions persist across much of the contemporary world (Böhme, Spreitzer, & Wamsler, 2024). Widespread displacement of Nature’s image as a nurturing mother led to loss of human relatedness with her, while her salience to humans became increasingly reduced to her instrumental value as a supply of resources.
The philosopher Charles Taylor (2007 pp. 135, 317) understood the mechanistic worldview’s separation of Westernised humans from Nature, and its denial of relational human subjectivities, as forging the ‘buffered self’, and observed: ‘In the effort to control our lives, or control nature, we have destroyed much that is deep and valuable in them’. The significance for Bloomington-school institutional analysis of the Romantic movement’s efforts to reverse this separation of humans from Nature is considered next.
3. Re-Enchantment
Romanticism arose in late-eighteenth-century Europe from a ‘crisis of sensibility … an impoverishment of what we can feel, perceive, and understand of living beings …’ (Morizot, 2022 p. 6). Most Romantics were not opposed to science per se but to its dominant mechanistic version. They sought to reinstate Nature as a matter for protection, and reverse the loss of sensitivity to her patterns and rhythms they viewed as integral to our humanity (Hinchman & Hinchman, 2007). Taylor (2011 p. 119) understood this as seeking ‘re-enchantment’.
Hinchman and Hinchman (2007 p. 334) characterised the Romantic movement as environmentalism’s ‘predecessor culture’. One early environmentalist influenced by Romantic ideas was Aldo Leopold (1949) who identified the supreme virtue of a naturalist as sensitivity to phenomena few modern humans notice because they are too subtle or deemed unworthy of attention.
The mechanistic worldview’s anthropocentric elevation of humans above nonhuman existence was rejected by Leopold. He viewed ‘the land’ (Nature) as a living organism and heralded the eventual evolution of a land ethic, observing that all ethics prompt individuals to cooperate in serving the interests of a community. A land ethic would ‘simply enlarge[…] the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’ (Leopold, 1949 p. 224). He argued that such an ethic would change ‘the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’ (Leopold, 1949 p. 203), but become normalised only with ‘internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions’ (Leopold, 1949 p. 210, emphasis added).
Berkes (2018 pp. 252–253) proposed that ecosystem management be informed by the many traditional indigenous cultures upholding ‘an ethic of nondominant, respectful human-nature relationship, a sacred ecology, as part of the belief component of traditional ecological knowledge’. He highlighted how ‘purely ecological aspects of tradition cannot be divorced from the social and spiritual’ (Berkes, 2018 p. 6) and endorsed the characterisation of sacred by Keali’ikanaka’oleohaililani and Giardina (2016 p. 57) as ‘those sentiments, actions, and commitments that emerge from spirit-based relationships that are founded on love, respect, care, intimate familiarity, and reciprocal exchange’. With echoes of Leopold’s land-community, Berkes (2018 p. 274) symbolised the relational worldview of sacred ecology as a ‘community of beings’. This is a worldview consonant with re-enchanting the commons.
In understanding the land as a place where human and nonhuman existence interpenetrates, and her health as her capacity for self-renewal, Leopold was transitional in developing a social-ecological perspective on sustainability science (Berkes, Doubleday, & Cumming, 2012). This perspective ‘aspires to go beyond interactionism (where social and ecological entities are seen [viz. atomism] as distinct but linked) to relational approaches that treat these domains as fundamentally … inseparable’ (de Vos et al., 2025 p. 4). It emerged from two research strands converging upon a complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach to this science: ecosystem resilience science, and Bloomington-school commons analysis (Schoon & Van der Leeuw, 2015). This approach thus understood Leopold’s ‘the land’ as a type of CAS called a social-ecological system (SES) (Berkes et al., 2012).
The social-ecological perspective’s aspiration to account for human-Nature relationality is increasingly evident among Bloomington-school scholars. Berkes (2018, 2023) has been particularly influential in highlighting the significance of this relationality, while Arun Agrawal (2003) urged commons analysts to consider how institutions shape human subjectivities regarding Nature.
These influences from within the Bloomington school have been accompanied by contributions from the feminist-political-ecology (FPE) tradition of commons scholarship. FPE scholars (e.g., Harcourt, 2021; Nightingale, 2019) have notably challenged Bloomington-school analysts to pay greater attention to issues of power relations (including across governance levels) and positionality when thinking about relationality and engaging with indigenous worldviews and knowledges. Particularly relevant to the present discussion, however, is the focus of FPE scholars (e.g., Clement, Harcourt, Joshi, & Sato, 2019; Nightingale, 2019) on how affective encounters between humans and Nature (‘affective socio-nature encounters’ (Singh, 2017)) shape human subjectivities. Their attention to such encounters followed from the affective turn in cultural studies, where affect relates to emotions: ‘Thinking in relational terms about affective [socio-nature] encounters helps us appreciate the important role of the more-than-human actors in the production of the commons and commoners’ (Singh, 2017 p. 767). This role is implicit in the aforementioned understanding of a sacred ecology as emerging from ‘spirit-based’, respectful, and otherwise emotional relationships of humans with the communities of beings to which we belong. The present article explores the implications of grounding Bloomington-school commons analysis in a model of human behaviour consistent with understanding our subjectivities as shaped in part by our encounters with these more-than-human communities.
4. Bloomington-School Analysis of Collective Action and Civic Virtue
This section turns to advancing the contribution of Bloomington-school commons scholarship to understanding how polycentric governance may help shape human subjectivities in ways strengthening our internal motivations to act collectively in sustaining Nature. This tradition’s previous contributions in this domain include E. Ostrom (2000), DeCaro and Stokes (2008), DeCaro and Stokes (2013), Marshall et al. (2017), Marshall and Malik (2019), DeCaro (2019), and DeCaro et al. (2021). These contributions are expanded in section 4.2 by drawing more from self-determination theory (SDT) than the Bloomington tradition has previously, and over sections 5 and 6 by considering how re-enchantment of human relations with Nature could help fashion commoner subjectivities favouring civic virtue for sustainability.
4.1 The Behavioural Theory of Collective Action
The first-generation or mechanistic theory of collective action (CA) typically assumes humans in all contexts behave as ‘rational egoists’; i.e., atomistically foregoing free-riding only as motivated by external incentives (E. Ostrom, 2000). For consistency with SDT, such incentives are referred to henceforth as external regulations.
The second-generation, or behavioural, theory of CA underpins Bloomington-school commons analysis and emerged from robust evidence that human groups sharing a CA problem typically include some members behaving as rational egoists and others as ‘conditional cooperators’; i.e., reciprocating other members’ behaviours. Although group members can be motivated to adopt a reciprocity strategy by the external incentives they encounter (e.g., from social norms) in a particular context, adoption is more likely the more the context leads them (e.g., through internalising relevant norms) to be internally motivated in following such a strategy (E. Ostrom, 2000).
Conditional cooperators can transform a social dilemma into an assurance problem wherein they contribute to the extent they trust one another to reciprocate. The behavioural theory accounts for how human emotions facilitate this process by strengthening the credibility of individuals’ commitments to reciprocate both cooperation and free-riding. In conducive contexts, reciprocity, trust and cooperation originating among conditional cooperators can spread to others who learn of this and become more trusting that their own contributions would be reciprocated (E. Ostrom, 1998).
This theory explains how the unique social-ecological context of each group sharing a CA problem affects its own mix of members behaving as rational egoists and conditional cooperators, and thereby its aggregate level of collective-good provision. Recognising that ‘many different models of the individual are consistent with the principle of methodological individualism’ (E. Ostrom, 1982 p. 24), this theory’s model is relational rather than atomistic: ‘Social scientists … need to recognize that individual behavior is strongly affected by the context in which interactions take place rather than being simply a result of individual differences’ (E. Ostrom, 2010 p. 661).
4.2 Self-Determination Theory
4.2.1 The self, basic psychological needs, goals, and intrinsic motivation
Ostrom (2000) and DeCaro (2019) drew from SDT in explaining how the context of each CA problem affects its mix of humans behaving as rational egoists and conditional cooperators. SDT’s foundational concern is with the human self, seen as developing though internalisation and integration of inputs from both external and internal sources. Healthy development of the self is understood to depend on satisfying our basic needs, both physiological and psychological. SDT focuses on the latter, and presently recognises three such needs: autonomy, competence, and (inter-human) relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2019).
SDT distinguishes basic needs from goals, which arise from interaction between the needs and cultural inputs: ‘[T]here are many factors that lead people to emphasize certain life goals that may not be need fulfilling … [and] could actually detract from basic need fulfillment’ (Ryan & Deci, 2000 p. 75).
Goals are differentiated in SDT as intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic goals focus on inherent propensities, like seeking close relationships. Extrinsic goals focus on goods like wealth and power that are instrumental in obtaining benefits (e.g., respect) from others. SDT proposes that pursuing intrinsic goals tends to better satisfy the basic needs, with humans thwarted in satisfying them tending to compensate by prioritising extrinsic goals (Ryan & Deci, 2017).
SDT highlights the negative implications for needs satisfaction of cultural conditions across much of humanity now prioritising extrinsic goals over the basic needs. This theory suggests intrinsic motivation, as well as internalisation and integration of external regulations (section 4.2.2), is consequently weakened. Intrinsic motivation arises from the inherent emotional reward gained from an activity or, more fundamentally, the wellbeing gained from its support for the basic needs (Ryan & Deci, 2017).
Ostrom (2000) took her lead from how economists employing motivation crowding theory (MCT) had applied SDT. MCT focuses on the autonomy need, how humans experience external regulations as supporting or thwarting this need, and how these experiences influence their intrinsic motivation (Frey & Jegen, 2001). Autonomy is a feeling that one’s behaviours are freely self-endorsed (Ryan, Kuhl, & Deci, 1997).
MCT proposes that external regulations tend to crowd in intrinsic motivation when targeted individuals experience them as supporting their autonomy, and crowd it out when they are experienced as thwarting it (Frey & Jegen, 2001). External regulations include social norms of reciprocity, trustworthiness and fairness which can motivate humans to conditionally cooperate in solving a CA problem. Ostrom (2000) concluded accordingly that these norms will tend to be crowded in, increasing the proportion of individuals intrinsically motivated to behave as conditional cooperators in solving CA problems, the more the contexts of those problems are experienced as autonomy-supporting.
MCT researchers Frey and Jegen (2001 p. 604) concluded similarly from a societal perspective, associating intrinsic motivation with civic virtue:
Civic virtue (a particular manifestation of intrinsic motivation) is bolstered if the public laws convey the notion that citizens are to be trusted. … The basic notion enshrined in the constitution that citizens are on average, and in general, reasonable human beings thus generates a crowding-in effect of civic virtue.
4.2.2 Autonomous motivation
Although intrinsic motivation often remains an important impetus for action, much of contemporary behaviour is motivated extrinsically (externally to the self). SDT identifies four types of extrinsic motivation varying in the degree to which external regulations are internalised and integrated to the self. Two of these (integrated and identified) types entail high degrees of internalisation, leading one to volitionally engage in a task even if it is not inherently gratifying. SDT groups these two motivation types with intrinsic motivation as forms of autonomous motivation, as distinct from controlled motivation. Because autonomously-motivated individuals have freely endorsed a task’s value, they tend to persist with it longer (Ryan & Deci, 2019). Marshall and Malik’s (2019) lead in associating civic virtue with autonomous motivation is followed here.
SDT identifies an inherent tendency for humans to move towards autonomous motivation wherever possible, i.e., when we subjectively experience, given our cultural and other conditioning, our context as supporting our needs (Ryan & Deci, 2019).
The importance for civic virtue of institutional interventions (as external regulations) experienced as needs-supporting is now well-established empirically (e.g., Akers & Yasué, 2019; Bowles, 2008). Individuals’ perceptions of whether particular external regulations are supportive of their basic needs are shaped in part by how their context influences their values. In a case study by Turner, Gill et al. (2018) of coral-reef fishers in four Caribbean nations, for instance, fishers depending heavily on fishing for economic survival are less likely than recreational fishers to perceive external regulations restricting fishing for conservation reasons as supportive of their autonomy, and thus to be autonomously-motivated in complying.
When our needs are satisfied, enabling full development of our integrative capacities, humans are ‘not … selfish. … [T]he most integrated persons are not those that act only on their own behalf but also with others in mind. … [A]t our best, … the more of the living world we see ourselves relating to’ (Ryan & Deci, 2017 pp. 648, 649). Lumber, Richardson et al. (2017) argued that strengthening humanity’s relatedness with Nature requires such an expansion of the self, which social psychology conceptualises by way of self-other overlap (or merging) (Ladak, Wilks, & Anthis, 2023).
4.2.3 Biophilia and pro-Nature autonomous motivation
This section transitions to a more-than-human, or sacred-ecology, perspective, by considering: (a) how human experiences of Nature and its nonhuman elements (‘nature exposure’) could support SDT’s three presently-recognised basic needs; (b) whether more-than-human relatedness might be a fourth basic need; and (c) the potential of such ‘nature relatedness’ to strengthen pro-Nature autonomous motivation or civic virtue.
4.2.3.1 The biophilia hypothesis
This hypothesis (Wilson, 1984 p. 139) challenged the mechanistic worldview’s presumption that humans are separate from the rest of Nature and value her constituent nonhuman entities only instrumentally. It proposed that coevolution with Nature led humans to develop a biologically-based need to affiliate with her.
Biophilia is understood to encompass various tendencies understood as relatively weak biological dispositions. Fulfilment of each tendency depends on opportunities for relevant experience: ‘Yet increasingly we embrace a biologically impoverished, artificial, and environmentally degraded existence’ (Kellert, 1997 pp. 172–173).
Engaging with Nature for the fascination and wellbeing she affords is referred to as the naturalistic tendency. Although two of the other hypothesised biophilic tendencies – valuing Nature instrumentally (e.g., for sustenance) and for experiencing competence – originally yielded humans important adaptive advantages, their behavioural expression is often now distorted by extrinsic, including materialistic, goals that thwart the naturalistic tendency by leading us to degrade and otherwise neglect Nature (Kellert, 1997). Christens, McCormick et al. (2025) observed it is not uncommon for contemporary humans to be amongst Nature but still alienated from her because our attention is elsewhere. Among prominent efforts to counter such alienation are religious teachings including Laudato Si’ (Holy See, 2015) and Al-Mizan (Llewellyn & Khalid, 2024).
4.2.3.2 Nature exposure’s support for SDT’s presently-identified basic needs
It is now well-established that human experiences of Nature benefit our wellbeing (see Bratman, Olvera-Alvarez, & Gross, 2021 for meta-analysis). SDT research has contributed to understanding how these benefits arise – particularly in respect of wellbeing’s subjective vitality dimension, associated with energy to act on a motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2019). This research yielded the theoretical proposition: ‘Other factors aside, meaningful exposure to living nature has a positive effect on subjective vitality relative to exposure to non-natural, built environments without living elements, and this relation is mediated in part by basic psychological needs’ (Ryan & Deci, 2017 p. 265). Given this proposition’s recognition that meaningful nature exposure supports the basic needs, and SDT’s aforementioned proposition that basic needs support facilitates internalisation and integration of external regulations, it follows that such exposure tends to promote autonomous motivation (civic virtue) in cooperating conditionally with such regulations.
This proposition’s reference to meaningful nature exposure aligns with empirical findings that quality of contact with Nature is equally if not more significant for wellbeing than its duration (Christens et al., 2025). For example, Richardson, Passmore et al. (2021) found from studying a sample of UK adults that a measure of attentiveness to Nature (e.g., observing wildlife) was more strongly associated with their subjective wellbeing than time spent with her.
How might meaningful nature exposure support SDT’s three presently-identified needs? SDT researchers Weinstein, Przybylski and Ryan (2009) attributed their finding that nature exposure predicted increased feelings of autonomy among their subjects to this exposure: (a) presenting them with inherently stimulating and interesting stimuli that orients them to their present and internal states; and (b) freeing them from their daily pressures. Similarly to (b), Passmore and Howell (2014) argued that natural contexts support human autonomy by imposing fewer social constraints on us, and Moore and Van Vliet (2022) found we tend to depict Nature as a place to feel free. Nature exposure’s support of the competence need has been attributed to the unique opportunities Nature offers humans to be challenged physically and mentally (Di Domenico & Ryan, 2017; Kellert, 1997). Landon et al. (2021 p. 15) discussed how exposure to natural landscapes can support interhuman relatedness, observing how wilderness experiences are often shared with others and are typically ‘coupled with the unique ethos that accompanies the intimate social world of backcountry wilderness recreationists’. Nature exposure in urban settings (e.g., green neighbourhoods) has also been found to benefit interhuman relatedness (Kuo, Sullivan, Coley, & Brunson, 1998; Sugiyama, Leslie, Giles-Corti, & Owen, 2008).
4.2.3.3 Nature relatedness: an additional basic need?
There are calls meanwhile for SDT to recognise that meaningful nature exposure benefits human wellbeing by supporting a fourth basic psychological need – nature relatedness: ‘the human feeling of belonging to a natural setting or landscape’ (Ezzine-de-Blas, Corbera, & Lapeyre, 2019 p. 436). Restoring this feeling amounts to re-enchantment.
Baxter and Pelletier (2019) and Hurly and Walker (2019) concluded from assessments against established criteria for identifying a basic psychological need that nature relatedness should be recognised as such a need, leading SDT’s progenitors (Ryan & Deci, 2019 p. 136) to encourage further investigation of ‘whether exposure to living nature is among our basic psychological needs’. Winkler-Schor, van Riper et al. (2025 p. 8) recently reported empirical findings ‘support[ing] the argument that nature relatedness may play a motivational role consistent with that of a psychological need’.
A recent systematic review and meta-analysis found nature exposure to be positively associated with diverse pro-Nature behaviours, and concluded: ‘[I]nterventions aimed at increasing personal interactions with nature may contribute, at least partly, to facilitating behaviour change that helps address various major environmental issues we face today …’ (Soga & Gaston, 2024 p. 7). Relevant to the present article’s focus on sustainability as a collective good, Zelenski, Dopko et al. (2015 p. 29) found from laboratory experiments involving a fishing-themed commons dilemma that participants exposed to a nature video harvested more sustainably, while suggesting ‘repeated experiences in nature … may foster a more stable sense of nature relatedness …’. Sheffield, Butler et al. (2022 pp. 18, 16) found accordingly from updating prior meta-analytic reviews:
clear evidence … that engaging in nature connection practices on a regular … basis can lead to sustained increases in nature connectedness … [T]he sustained benefits observed in the reviewed studies were obtained from studies that included repeated interventions that involved noticing nature or practising mindfulness or engaging with nature.
4.2.3.4 Nature relatedness and pro-Nature autonomous motivation
SDT researchers Weinstein et al. (2009) reported empirical support for the hypothesis that nature exposure increases humans’ valuing of intrinsic goals relative to extrinsic goals. It might then reasonably be proposed from an SDT perspective that the contribution of meaningful nature exposure to pro-Nature behaviours occurs partly through increasing individuals’ valuing of intrinsic goals, particularly in respect of relatedness with Nature, relative to extrinsic goals. The strengthening of this relatedness due to this shift in relative goal valuations would increase in turn the likelihood of humans experiencing pro-Nature external regulations as autonomy-supportive rather than controlling, and thus of developing civic virtue to abide by those regulations.
As discussed in section 4.2.1, SDT proposes that humans tend to prioritise extrinsic goals when thwarted in satisfying our basic needs. If nature relatedness is indeed one of these needs, this proposition helps explain how meaningful nature exposure strengthens individuals’ prioritisation of intrinsic goals: (i) it lessens thwarting of our need for nature relatedness, thereby (ii) downgrading prioritisation of extrinsic vis-à-vis intrinsic goals.
5. Community-Based Governance and Civic Virtue: A Disenchanted Perspective
The advantages of community-based vis-à-vis other governance arrangements in supporting the basic needs and thereby promoting civic virtue (for provision of collective goods generally, including sustainability) are now considered from the disenchanted perspective implicitly adopted in most Bloomington-school commons analyses. This perspective assumes that human subjectivities are ‘buffered’ from encounters with more-than-human dimensions of their context. The focus narrows in section 6 to civic virtue specifically for provision of social-ecological sustainability, with the perspective taken in considering this focus shifting to the re-enchanted worldview of sacred ecology.
5.1 Governance as a Pervasive Contextual Influence on Civic Virtue
SDT recognises both proximal (e.g., teacher) and pervasive (e.g., mass media) factors as potentially significant contextual influences on internalisation and integration of external regulations. Proximal contexts are shaped by the pervasive contexts, including governance arrangements, embedding them (Ryan & Deci, 2019).
Some Bloomington-school studies (Marshall et al., 2017; Marshall & Malik, 2019; E. Ostrom, 2000) considering polycentric and/or community-based governance as a pervasive contextual factor influencing civic virtue via internalisation of external regulations focused on its support only for the autonomy need. Other studies in this tradition (DeCaro, 2019; DeCaro et al., 2021; DeCaro & Stokes, 2008) accounted for such governance’s support for all three of SDT’s presently-identified basic needs, while one (DeCaro & Stokes, 2013) accounted for two of these needs: autonomy and interhuman relatedness.
DeCaro (2019) integrated insights from earlier such studies with his colleagues in formulating ‘humanistic rational choice theory’. This theory proposes that governance systems supportive of the basic needs tend to increase conditional cooperation within a population and thereby strengthen its mutual trust and collective action.
Insights from studies of how community-based forms of polycentric governance may support SDT’s presently-identified three basic needs are now considered.
5.2 Support for the Autonomy Need
Although polycentric governance is normally characterised as comprising ‘many centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other’ (V. Ostrom, Tiebout, & Warren, 1961 p. 831), formal independence is not necessarily autonomy-supporting; some centres, for instance, may exploit fiscal dominance over others to control them despite formal independence (Marshall, 2015).
Berkes (2018 p. 273) envisaged sacred ecology as arising from traditional indigenous systems of ecosystem management which inspire a social-ecological science ‘open to … locally grounded alternatives to top-down centralised resource management. The subsidiarity principle is the general principle here …’. This principle requires that responsibility for each governance function, together with corresponding decision-making rights, be assigned to the lowest level at which it can be exercised competently. It enables ‘[t]he autonomy of individuals and their proximate governing structures [to be] maximised subject to a competency constraint’ (Marshall & Lobry de Bruyn, 2022 p. 61). Governance organised by this principle is community-based rather than community-level since it ‘extends beyond communities to include institutional linkages and multiple levels of organization that impact and shape institutions at the local level’ (Berkes, 2007 p. 15193).
Community-based governance is understood accordingly in this article, although alternative understandings exist (Ruiz-Mallén, Schunko, Corbera, Rös, & Reyes-García, 2015). Berkes’ understanding of community-based governance was followed by Marshall, Hine, et al. (2017) in an experiment which provided statistical support for hypothesised tendencies of community-based vis-à-vis centralised governance of a regional climate-change trust fund to strengthen participants’ perceptions of autonomy support, and thereby their autonomous motivation to contribute to the fund, and thus finally their contributions to the fund.
The subsidiarity principle accords with at least two of Ostrom’s (1990) design principles for robust commons governance: the third principle (‘collective-choice arrangements’: most individuals can participate in modifying the institutions (rules) by which they are governed) and the seventh (‘minimal recognition of rights to organise’: individuals’ rights to devise institutions for governing their commons are not over-ridden by external authorities). It thus enables individuals to shape self-governance institutions well-matched to social-ecological contextual factors (e.g., local norms) affecting their subjective perceptions of what supports their autonomy (and other needs). In contrast, external interventions introduced ostensibly to support community-based governance or public participation are not uncommonly ill-matched to local conditions and thus perceived as controlling (DeCaro & Stokes, 2008).
DeCaro et al. (2021 p. 16) observed accordingly that ‘[g]ood governance … requires a firm grasp of people’s perceptions in particular social-ecological settings’. The success of community-based governance in strengthening civic virtue within a society thus arises from the opportunities subsidiarity offers its members to collectively identify for themselves what institutional arrangements would be a ‘psychosocial fit’ (DeCaro et al., 2021 p. 3) with what they perceive as supporting their autonomy (and other needs) given their context. As demonstrated by Dedeurwaerdere et al.’s (2016) comparative analysis of 34 European governance arrangements for biodiversity conservation, a good fit of this kind tends to strengthen ‘institutional acceptance’ within a population and thereby increase autonomously-motivated institutional compliance (DeCaro & Stokes, 2013 p. 1).
5.3 Support for the Competence Need
Competence is the second of SDT’s basic needs. Satisfying this need ‘seem[s] to result only when there is some continual stretching of one’s capacities’ (Deci & Ryan, 1985 p. 27). Centralised governance, in contrast, diminishes opportunities for individuals to experience competence in governing their own affairs. This centralisation is legitimised by the ‘message contained in the policy literature … that citizens do not have the knowledge or skills needed to design appropriate institutions to overcome collective-action problems’ (E. Ostrom, 2000 p. 12).
Community-based governance offers diverse challenges across multiple governance levels by which this impoverishment of civic life might be reversed, and against which members of a group might optimally satisfy their competence need, thereby strengthening their civic virtue. This claim follows from subsidiarity requiring (as noted in section 5.2) that any task be assigned to the governance level closest to the individual where it can competently be exercised, with tasks reassigned as competencies change (Marshall, 2008b). This principle’s autonomy support also enables decision makers to design governance tasks such that the competence needs of individuals can be better satisfied given their respective capacities and perceptions of psychosocial fit.
Community-based governance’s autonomy support can also help satisfy its constituents’ needs for competence by demonstrating trust in their abilities (DeCaro & Stokes, 2008). This support can also boost its constituents’ sense of competence through strengthening their civic virtue, the level of collective action they can thus jointly achieve, and thereby their confidence in their abilities. Conversely, initial failure to solve a commons dilemma was found to weaken individuals’ perceptions of support for their competence (and also interhuman relatedness) needs (DeCaro et al., 2021).
5.4 Support for the Interhuman Relatedness Need
The last of SDT’s presently-recognised basic needs is interhuman relatedness. This is the need to be trusting of, close to, caring for, and cared for by others. SDT views this relatedness as important for internalisation of extrinsically-motivated behaviours, and also beliefs, values and norms from the prevailing context, since humans are especially influenced by those we feel connected with (Ryan & Deci, 2017).
Section 5.2 considered how community-based governance supports the autonomy need, and how this support strengthens internalisation of reciprocity, trustworthiness, and fairness norms. With each of these norms clearly enhancing interhuman relatedness, it follows this governance is supportive of such relatedness within the relevant population, and consequently of strengthening individuals’ feelings of belonging to a community.
Community-based governance supports humans not only in satisfying our interhuman relatedness need from intra-local interactions. It is ‘a polycentric arrangement in which higher-level governance structures serving larger groups support or ‘nest’ … lower-level structures serving smaller groups’ (Marshall & Lobry de Bruyn, 2022 p. 61). This nesting can extend interhuman relatedness beyond the local by ‘mediat[ing] the trust and reciprocity needed for voluntary cooperation both upwards and downwards into the wider system’ (Marshall, 2008a p. 123), particularly by ‘breaking into smaller steps what may otherwise be alienating social distances’ (Marshall & Malik, 2019 p. 214). DeCaro and Stokes (2008) recognised accordingly how community-based governance can achieve psychosocial fit with a range of individual subjectivities, thus enabling diverse individuals to feel ‘more “at home” in society’ (Berger & Neuhaus, 1977 p. 3).
The process of such governance is thus a form of what commons scholars in the FPE and post-capitalist-economies traditions call commoning, which includes constituting a community of individuals with subjectivities of commoners (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, & Healy, 2016). Its ability to grow what individuals perceive as their community accords with Bollier and Helfrich’s (2019 p. 74) argument that ‘[t]he power of commoning is not limited to interpersonal relations in groups but extends to the organizing of larger society as well’. Contrast the interhuman relatedness benefits of such commoning with Ayivor, Nyametso et al.’s (2020) finding, from research with 45 Ghanaian communities subject to protected areas governance, that centralised governance of such areas tended to negatively influence community members’ trust in, and cooperation with, these regimes.
Given the support from community-based governance identified above for all three of SDT’s presently-recognised basic needs, and SDT’s proposition that support for the basic needs strengthens civic virtue, it follows that provision of a collective good (e.g., sustainability) will be strengthened by such governance. Such success can reduce distrust within a community, thereby strengthening support for its members’ interhuman relatedness (DeCaro et al., 2021).
6. Community-Based Governance and Civic Virtue for Sustainability: A Re-Enchanted Perspective
Advantages of community-based vis-à-vis centralised forms of governance in supporting SDT’s three presently-recognised basic needs, thereby promoting civic virtue for CA, were considered in section 5 from a disenchanted perspective that assumes human subjectivities are unaffected by encounters with more-than-human dimensions of their context.
Challenges to this assumption from the biophilia hypothesis and ensuing scholarship were reviewed in section 4.2.3 as a basis for the present section’s exploration of how shifting to a re-enchanted, or sacred-ecology, perspective could enhance how we understand community-based governance as affecting civic virtue for CA. This exploration is particularly relevant to the present article’s focus on CA for social-ecological sustainability (i.e., sustaining Nature) given section 2’s discussion of how the negative consequences of disenchantment, especially widespread loss of internal motivations to care for Nature, persist across much of humanity.
A sacred-ecology perspective returns into view community-based governance’s potential to reverse this loss of internal (autonomous) motivation, or civic virtue, by increasing meaningful human exposure to Nature and thereby nature relatedness, particularly when this governance is focused on her sustainability. Considering this potential accords with Sheffield et al. (2022) emphasising the value of complementing interventions in the proximal context intended to enhance conditions for nature relatedness (e.g., funding an urban nature reserve) with those in the pervasive context (e.g., institutions for participatory urban design). Bloomington-school analysts do not appear to have acknowledged this potential previously, although Menzies (2014 p. 66) concluded from broader commons scholarship how, ‘The work of reconnect[ing humans to the land entails] … rebuilding responsible self-governance … from the community up. It will take time to build the base for a … polycentric grassroots movement …’.
Community-based governance of this kind potentially outperforms centralised governance in fostering meaningful nature exposure in at least two ways, considered below: (a) increasing engagement with activities enabling such exposure; and (b) better providing venues for this exposure.
6.1 Increasing Human Engagement with Nature Exposure Opportunities
Section 2 explained how the mechanistic worldview justified the solving of all CA problems through centralised governance. This approach substitutes universal principles for place-based knowledge, and thus for the human engagement with local social-ecological contexts needed to acquire such knowledge. Shifting from centralised to community-based governance reverses this dynamic, increasing opportunities for such engagement, and thus for meaningful nature exposure and the civic virtue this may foster.
When the focus of community-based governance is on social-ecological sustainability (sustaining Nature), its support for autonomy typically affords considerable scope for designing local engagement opportunities that not only enhance meaningful nature exposure but also better match local preferences for it. (Section 5.2 noted how autonomy support accords with two of Ostrom’s (1990) design principles for robust commons governance, those concerning ‘collective-choice arrangements’ and ‘minimal recognition of rights to organise’). LoTemplio, McDonnell et al. (2023 p. 251) thus recommended U.S. governments:
… Invest in the Agency of Communities to Break Down Barriers to Accessing Wellbeing in Nature. … [C]ommunity-based approaches can leverage community agency to understand local needs. For example, one community may be interested in outdoor recreation … Another community may decide community gardens are more important.
Such autonomy is particularly valuable since ‘specific routes to [nature] connectedness are still unclear’, and this connectedness is unlikely to respond uniformly to following the same route when social-ecological contexts differ (Lumber et al., 2017 p. 1; see also Sheffield et al., 2022). Christens et al. (2025) similarly highlighted continuing uncertainty over what forms of nature exposure (e.g., citizen science, community gardening) best promote such connectedness.
The polycentricity of a community-based governance system yields significant advantages in closing such knowledge gaps by enabling multiple units of the system to ‘experiment’ simultaneously with autonomously-chosen strategies for increasing their meaningful exposure to (and thus relatedness with) Nature, and thereby identifying an evidence-based portfolio of effective strategies sooner than a centralised system. This advantage arises from units within a polycentric system overlapping one another, thereby facilitating inter-unit sharing of knowledge gained from each other’s ‘experiments’ (E. Ostrom, 2010).
Implicit in this knowledge are insights into what kinds of nature-relatedness-enhancing strategies (types of external regulations) would be perceived by individuals in a particular social-ecological context as supporting their needs, and thus likely to strengthen their civic virtue to engage with any nature-exposure activities included in those strategies. Any type of such activity can vary widely in its support for those needs. Different citizen-science activities, for instance, can afford participants more or less: flexibility in project choice; scope for experiencing competency; opportunities for interhuman bonding; and (if nature relatedness is a need) occasions for meaningful encounters with Nature.
Sheffield et al. (2022) concluded that efforts to help humans feel closer to Nature should be central to all attempts to improve the wellbeing of humans and/or Nature. They argued that integration of these diverse external regulations (e.g., across health, education, and housing domains) would strengthen overall nature-relatedness benefits by harnessing their synergies to address more effectively the root causes of alienation from Nature. Community-based vis-à-vis other governance types has advantages here given the greater autonomy it affords organisational units to integrate their efforts through collaboration, and its more direct accountability to constituents and thus stronger impetus to maximise, through the synergies of integration, the nature-relatedness gains from its interventions (Berkes, 2007).
Such interventions may involve modifying the conduct of governance functions not instigated originally to strengthen nature-exposure opportunities; e.g., monitoring and sanctioning rule compliance, and acquiring the social-ecological knowledge needed for sustainability. The autonomy afforded by community-based governance allows institutions governing the monitoring and sanctioning of on-ground behaviours (e.g., irrigation practices) and their ecological consequences (e.g., soil salinisation) to be adapted to entail meaningful nature exposure from local community members (e.g., when irrigators become responsible for monitoring each other’s water extractions from shared canals). The fourth and fifth of Ostrom’s institutional design principles – distilled from her finding that in robustly-governed commons ‘monitoring and sanctioning are undertaken not by external authorities but by the participants themselves’ or representatives accountable to them (E. Ostrom, 1990 p. 94) – are apposite here.
Advantages of community-based governance for acquiring knowledge in ways enabling nature exposure are suggested by two more of these design principles. The third principle follows from finding that ‘individuals who directly interact with one another and with the physical world can modify the rules over time so as to better fit them to the specific characteristics of their setting’, while the second identifies a need for congruence between institutions and local conditions (E. Ostrom, 1990 p. 93). Humans appropriating benefits from an SES are motivated to learn how the system operates since successful appropriation depends on this knowledge. Their recognition of benefits from nature exposure for acquiring this knowledge thus strengthens their motivations to gain such exposure, including by crafting institutions enabling it.
6.2 Sustaining Venues for Nature Exposure
Advantages of community-based vis-à-vis centralised governance in fostering civic virtue were discussed from a disenchanted perspective in section 5. At least with community-based governance for sustainability, these advantages serve to strengthen Nature’s sustainability and thereby prospects for establishing new venues amenable to meaningful nature exposure (e.g., reserves, community gardens, green spaces), and protecting and regenerating existing ones. Sheffield et al. (2022 pp. 18–19) recommended accordingly from their research: ‘Create Conditions for Nature Connection … Key to this is the provision and recovery of nature spaces … available and accessible to all’.
7. Landcare in Australia: Illustrating Some Opportunities and Challenges of Community-Based Governance in Growing Civic Virtue for Sustainability
Australia’s experience since the 1980s with Landcare illustrates the argument developed over sections 5 and 6, particularly by highlighting the opportunities and challenges this government-sponsored attempt at community-based governance encountered in supporting the basic needs and thereby strengthening civic virtue for sustaining Nature. This initiative’s original focus was on rural landholders ‘working in their own local social group to solve their own local land conservation problems in their own way’ (Poussard, 1992 p. 233). This model of grassroots self-reliance spread to urban and indigenous lands, and there are now more than 140,000 humans across Australia involved in ~16,000 Landcare-type groups (KPMG, 2021).
Early public funding of this initiative was limited to catalysing formation of local groups. A ‘regional delivery model’ for much greater funding of ‘natural resource’ management (NRM) was introduced in 2002, with funds channelled through 56 regional NRM bodies covering the nation. These bodies developed credibility as community-based by enabling Landcare and other local organisations to help shape regional priorities (Paton, Curtis, McDonald, & Woods, 2004).
Landcare’s original focus on individuals ‘working … in their own way’ was supportive of their needs for autonomy, as evidenced by KPMG (2021 p. 3) being ‘regularly struck by how many different types of Landcare groups [we] encountered’. Its emphasis on individuals’ self-reliance is supportive of their needs for competence. Black and Neill (2024 p. 15) found from qualitative research with participants in Landcare-themed activities that competence was a significant theme in reported outcomes.
This initiative’s approach of individuals working in local groups enables ‘greater opportunities for social interaction’, thus supporting their needs for interhuman relatedness (Curtis et al., 2014 p. 177). KPMG (2021) found 86 per cent of the ~1,000 Landcare volunteers and coordinators it surveyed felt more connected to their community due to Landcare participation. Molsher and Townsend’s (2015) case study of participants in a South Australian program offering Landcare-like environmental volunteering experience (e.g., in sea lion conservation) found also that participation enhanced such relatedness.
Australian Landcare illustrates also the advantages identified in section 6 of community-based governance in supporting community members’ basic needs by re-enchanting their relationships with Nature, viz. enhanced provision of venues for meaningful nature exposure, and greater engagement of community members in activities enabling such exposure.
The first advantage is demonstrated by the performance of Landcare groups and networks in (a) motivating their members to adopt practices expected to improve environmental conditions, and (b) collaborating with other (e.g., industry) organisations to deliver large-scale NRM projects (Curtis et al., 2014). KPMG (2021 p. 2) thus observed that wherever Landcare occurs ‘there is a local group of volunteers, and a small number of dedicated coordinators and staff, who are committed to creating new conservation spaces, and maintaining and improving existing ones’.
Regarding the second advantage, Landcare’s contribution to engaging individuals in activities exposing them meaningfully to Nature occurs across diverse terrains including farms, roadsides, public reserves, national parks, coastal walkways, urban parks, and waterways (Curtis et al., 2014; KPMG, 2021). This diversity is reflected by some groups labelling themselves Dunecare, Bushcare, Coastcare, Rivercare, etc., groups.
Landcare’s evident support for participants’ basic needs is consistent with Curtis, Ross et al. (2014 p. 185) recommending that it be recognised as the local level of a community-based governance system seeking to strengthen civic virtue for adopting sustainable behaviours. Widespread enduring disenchantment of human relations with Nature means, however, that public discourse around Landcare, and NRM more generally, in Australia remains mostly inattentive to nature exposure’s impacts on participants’ needs support, wellbeing, and civic virtue for sustaining Nature. The discourse has instead focused predominantly on the biophysical impacts of participation; e.g., numbers of trees planted.
Reflecting an emerging literature (e.g., Molsher & Townsend, 2015) on environmental volunteering more generally, KPMG (2021 p. 2) called for this inattentiveness to be remedied by ‘revers[ing] the [default] equation to consider not just the impact of people on the land, but also the impact of actively caring for the land on the people that actively care for it’. Evidence from KPMG’s (2021) survey of Landcare volunteers and coordinators supports this call. Of all survey respondents, 93 per cent felt more connected to the environment due to their participation. This result was mirrored by Black and Neill (2024 p. 15) finding from their qualitative research that participants in Landcare-themed outdoor activities ‘reported an increased connection to nature. This included being more relaxed and at peace with nature and a greater sense of environmental responsibility’. They found this deepened nature relatedness was their research’s ‘strongest overall theme; it was a motivator, a mechanism of change, and an outcome’ (Black & Neill, 2024 p. 19).
Meanwhile, the community leaders and policy makers championing the value of community-based Landcare for delivering the levels of civic virtue needed for sustainability have lost ground against a rising tide of neoliberalism. The community-based regional delivery model for NRM funding that was introduced nation-wide in 2002 was replaced six years later by a Caring for our Country program seeking to target funds ‘more strategically’; i.e., based on each project proposal’s assessed benefits for ‘natural assets’ prioritised centrally as nationally significant. This change represented a ‘shift from the stance of enabling communities to contribute more self-reliantly to solving the natural resource problems they face, to the neoliberal one of instrumentalising communities and their members as on-ground implementation agents of NRM strategies endorsed at higher levels’ (Curtis et al., 2014 p. 190). Resulting losses of support for Landcare group members’ basic needs threatened Landcare’s prior achievements in growing civic virtue for sustainability (Campbell, 2016).
8. Conclusion
Widespread disenchantment of our relations with Nature led to much of humanity valuing her predominantly for instrumental reasons, and thus to impoverishment of our civic virtue for ensuring her sustainability. Although the contemporary approach to pursuing this sustainability conventionally relies on institutions to externally motivate the required levels of collective action, the transaction costs of relying solely on this approach are prohibitive.
Elinor Ostrom (2010 p. 665) emphasised a vital role for institutions that the conventional approach neglects: ‘[A] core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans’. This article built on Bloomington-school institutional analyses that drew from self-determination theory in explaining how governance arrangements affect civic virtue. That theory proposes we are at our best – and most likely to act with civic virtue – when our basic psychological needs are supported so that our selves come to internalise and integrate more of Nature.
Community-based governance grounded in the subsidiarity principle was argued above to contribute more than other governance arrangements to such support, including by re-enchanting human relations with Nature, and thus to promoting civic virtue for collective action towards sustaining Nature. For any given level of institutional capacity to externally motivate pro-sustainability behaviours, therefore, such community-based governance can be expected to yield greater progress towards sustainability than other governance arrangements. Australia’s experience with its Landcare initiative highlights the importance for realising this potential of educating relevant policy communities about the significance of their governance design choices for the supply of civic virtue upon which the feasibility of social-ecological sustainability ultimately depends.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for valuable and generous feedback on earlier versions of this paper from Bryan Bruns, Ronald Oakerson, and four anonymous reviewers. Generative AI tools were not used in developing this article.