Preserving ones meaningful place or not? Understanding environmental stewardship behaviour in river landscapes

•Place relations and values relate positively to the occurrence of environmental stewardship.•Psychological attributes explain stewardship only if respondents care about all places.•Psychological attributes are not related to stewardship if respondents care for some places but not others.•Terminological and definitional consistency around the stewardship concept is lacking. In times of climate change, globalization and urbanization, landscapes change rapidly. These new drivers, complexities and fast dynamics call for innovative governance approaches. Environmental stewardship could be one solution. As opposed to traditional hierarchical landscape management, it places people as main agents in the centre of action. This study employed a Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) method to gather data on citizens’ meaningful places and their corresponding willingness for local environmental stewardship. It aimed at exploring the relations between place relations and values, people characteristics and place characteristics. Place relations and values are understood as the meanings and values, emotional attachments and actualized experiences that connect people to places. People characteristics include socio-economic and psychological attributes and place characteristics are based on objective qualities of the place. Using descriptive statistics, bivariate correlation analysis and regression modelling, we found that (1) only place relations and values related positively to the occurrence of stewardship within the regression model, (2) psychological attributes, such as attitudes and capacity, only matter if respondents consistently care for all their meaningful places, (3) if respondents are only willing to commit to environmental stewardship at some of their meaningful places, this was only related to place values and relations.