Scottish government policymakers understanding of natural capital – survey data

The dataset is a set of responses to the survey which aimed to explore Scottish policy-makers’ understanding of natural capital and related concepts. The survey was open between late September and mid-December 2023 and collected 50 responses. It was hosted online, via the Qualtrics platform, and distributed to policy-makers within the Scottish Government. It asked questions about the policymakers’ job role, professional background, familiarity with Natural capital, familiarity with a tool called ENCA (Enabling a Natural Capital Approach), and the aims and challenges of embedding environmental sustainability considerations in decision-making. A mixture of open and closed (mostly Likert scale) questions were used, so this dataset contains a mix of categorical, ordinal and qualitative text responses. We have removed potentially-identifying information from this dataset, mostly relating to details of their job roles. However, we have provided some new recoded variables which summarise some of this professional information. The variable descriptions make clear which variables are the new recoded variables. Respondents were free to skip certain questions - blank cells show where no responses were recorded. This survey is part of the project titled ‘Galvanising change via Natural Capital’, project JHI-D5-3 funded by Scottish Government’s 2022-2027 Strategic Research Programme. If you would like to read more, you can visit the project website here.