Conserving English Landscapes

Land Managers and Agri-Environmental Policy

Bibliographic Data

ID4890979
AuthorsR Fish (0000-0001-7198-0403, University of Nottingham, corresponding author), Susanne Seymour (0000-0002-0318-5843, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England, corresponding author), Charles Watkins (0000-0002-0618-3771, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume35
Issue1
Pages19-41
Publication date2003-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a3531
OpenAlexW2049020296
LanguageEN
Citations received49
References cited25

There is increasing public policy interest in the management of rural landscapes for conservation, both in terms of natural and cultural heritage. Agri-environmental policies are an important part of an emerging vision for a sustainable countryside, with increasing support for the existing Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) and Countryside Stewardship (CS) schemes. This paper provides insight into the nature of land-manager attitudes towards the conservation of rural landscapes and how these relate to differing modes and levels of engagement with these two schemes. It is based on the results of a recently completed project exploring the attitudes and practices of 100 land managers towards features of landscape and historic interest. Agri-environmental research has often sought to 'typologise' attitudes and practices around discrete land-manager types; an approach that may downgrade commonalities between land managers, the potential interplay of elements defining these types, and the possibility that land-manager identities may not be uniform. In this paper, in contrast, we emphasise the significance of these three analytical issues surrounding land-manager attitudes and practices. We explore land managers' interest and investment in conservation and go on to explain how these concerns were often closely related to the wildlife, historic and aesthetic goals of the schemes. The analysis then considers in detail how a concern for conservation often came to interplay with economic concerns to produce different attitudes and practices. We term these 'styles of participation and nonparticipation' to emphasise that such modes of uptake are not necessarily associated with specific land-manager types. Land managers developed these attitudes and practices with respect to different parts of their farms, types of landscape feature, and scheme in question. We conclude by emphasising the importance of contextualised analyses of land-manager values, knowledges, and practices for exploring the nature and possibilities of a 'sustainable countryside', and the role of agri-environmental policy within this policy vision of rural areas

Business · Economics · Environmental planning · Environmental resource management · Environmental stewardship · Geography · Land management · Land use · Political science · Politics · Wildlife · Agricultural Economics and Policy · Forest Management and Policy · Rural development and sustainability · Ecology

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