What is stewardship?
A brief introduction
Characteristics of a steward
To get a sense of what stewardship may entail on a personal level it can be helpful to sketch some prominent traits and characteristics of good stewards. These are not in any way definitive, rather they are markers of behaviours that stewards often carry, and in the context of this text can help us understand a bit more of what stewardship is.
Taking responsibility: Taking ownership of one's duties and ensuring resources are managed effectively and sustainably. Demonstrating dedication and perseverance in fulfilling stewardship responsibilities.
Exercising integrity: Maintaining ethical standards and honesty in all actions and decisions. Communicating openly and clearly about decisions and processes.
Being empathetic: Understanding and balancing the needs and impacts for all stakeholders, including the more than human world.
Showing vision: Holding space for shared vision and foresight to emerge and ensure long-term commitment and sustainability.
Fostering collaboration and community: Working well with others, valuing diverse perspectives, nurturing psychological safety, and building partnerships to achieve desired outcomes.
Allowing for emergence and adaptability: Being flexible and open to change, allowing for adjustments in ideas, strategies and practices, as needed over time.
Being accountable: Being answerable for actions and outcomes, even beyond one’s direct influence, and willing to accept responsibility for shortcomings and mistakes.
Cultivating renewal: Seeking new and creative responses to challenges that arise, thus continuously improving stewardship practices.
Framing what Stewardship is about
In essence stewardship can be viewed as the act of choosing service over self interest. It is generally recognised as the acceptance or assignment of responsibility to shepherd and safeguard the valuables of others. ‘Others’ also relates to the more than human world, our whole biosphere and all its living organisms.
As such, stewardship is a practice committed to ethical values, service of life and embodies the long term accountability and management of resources. Seeing the world as “resources” is human-centric, and problematic in itself. Still, this view of stewardship can be applied quite meaningfully across various domains, including the environment, economics, health, property, information, theology, and cultural resources.
In the context of sustainability, stewardship involves understanding that humans are a custodian species, thus caring deeply for and wisely managing human impact on the biosphere and ecosystems. But it also supports sustainable missions of companies, organisations and movements, in a way that is beneficial for both current and future generations of all species.
Connected to companies, stewardship has normally been seen as a long term financial duty of directors. However, environmental and social damage (externalities as they are called by economists) such as pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, income inequality and health issues have historically not been included or been substantially underplayed. Thus the true function of stewardship has been discarded, and instead paved way for incentives to build private wealth and power structures at the expense of the commons. Underpinning the whole idea of more and better stewardship is that such principles and practices need to change.
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