Dear Colleagues,

We are experiencing a rapidly changing world, with record numbers of people being displaced from their traditional environments, resulting in the disruption and fracture of localized cultural ecosystems and the services that they provide. Key to this process of development and transition is the significant loss of traditions, cultures, and close relationships between human beings and nature. Even though new technologies are making life very different, people–environment relationships form a fundamental role in society. Experience in countries which have made an effort to revitalize their countryside has shown that reshaping people–land and people–water relationships is strongly connected with the efficacy, efficiency, and sustainability of governmental investment. Such relationships are also strongly associated with urban nostalgia, and become an invisible cultural driving force for the flow of capital, technology, and human resources back to rural areas, leading to booming new service economies and the subsequent generation of new forms of cultural ecosystem service.

Therefore, in this Special Issue, authors are encouraged to look into the changing people–environment relationships in different contexts of development and transition, in different regions, and from a range of inter-disciplinary perspectives. In particular, we are trying to explore the mechanisms and processes through which people–environment relationships change, including the identification of key factors, in order to evaluate the subsequent impacts on sustainable development and transition. Efforts are also encouraged which look into potential ways of integrating the emergent reshaped people–environment relationships, and their attendant cultural ecosystem services, generated through the process of rural revitalization, the restructure of rural communities, and the rebuilding of collective actions.

The detailed schedule is as following:

Prof. Dr. Neil Ravenscroft
Prof. Dr. Pingyang Liu
Prof. Dr. Ely Jose de Mattos
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• People–land relationship
• people–water relationship
• people–nature relationship
• people–environment relationship
• Rural revitalization
• rural transition
• rural development
• Guanxi network
• community-based management
• collective action
• Cultural values
• social value
• social-cultural valuation
• Ecosystem service
• ecosystem valuation
• Resource management
• resource policy
• sustainable development