Stewardship and everyday governance: Managing materialities in a south‐eastern village community, Estonia

Abstract

This article examines landscape stewardship from the perspective of landscape biography and focuses on different outcomes on how individual and collective stewardship connected to local place attachment and historic understandings are leveraged as local knowledge in sustaining locally important landscapes. The analysis is based on semi‐structured interviews with local people and active residents in three neighbouring villages of south‐eastern Estonia. Particular attention is paid to their place attachment and self‐actualisation in landscape materialities, such as housing, village centre, water bodies and village borders. To bring the diverse types of knowledge connected to landscape stewardship to the forefront, the study suggests careful differentiation between neo‐endogenous community governance and place‐based wisdom of local stakeholders. This differentiation indicates that stewardship should be identified as a micro‐policy term that is oriented towards a collective platform of the information exchange for local capacity building. This would lead to multiple and resilient place‐based know‐how related to territories, political networks and associated land use discourses.