Digital pathways to environmental stewardship

Digitalization is transforming the ways people experience nature and is often blamed for a decline in environmental values and stewardship action. Yet, there is little understanding of how social media content facilitates indirect nature experiences and influences notions of care for nature. This conceptual paper explores how social media can be a space of both opportunity and risk to mobilize values for environmental stewardship. We argue for the potential to rely on three interconnected pathways: affective, cognitive, and enabling pathways. The affective pathway deepens care by fostering emotional connections to nature via storytelling and social validation, yet care is eroded through aestheticization and emotional saturation. The cognitive pathway broadens knowledge by democratizing access to information and facilitating collective sense-making, although knowledge is distorted through algorithmic mediation, the creation of echo chambers, and the reinforcement of pre-existing beliefs. The enabling pathway drives agency through social contagion and grassroots mobilization, linking local actions to global discourses, yet existing unequal power dynamics are also reinforced. Therefore, designing effective communication strategies and network structures in a rapidly changing offline-online environment will be essential for leveraging the potential of social media for sustained environmental stewardship and avoiding the risks. • Social media complements traditional forms of mobilizing values for stewardship. • Grounding digital nature values into action is a relational, iterative process. • We discuss tensions between grounding pathways and risks of dispersing values. • Potential lies in deepening care, contextualizing knowledge, and enabling action.