Opportunities for achieving landscape scale conservation in England

Abstract

The English countryside is set to undergo significant changes in the way it will be managed in the coming year. The incoming Environmental Land Management schemes represents a shift in scale and focus of public goods provisioning, with the Landscape Recovery scheme in particular now geared more in favour of a coordinated landscape scale delivery of these public goods. This also comes at a time when the countryside has been experiencing a diversification within the land management community, which are moving towards an increasingly heterogenous mix of values and motivations for occupying and managing land. This will have implication as to how effective these public goods can be delivered on a landscape scale. Further complicating this is that while the idea of landscape scale collaboration to deliver more meaningful outcomes towards conservation has been widely accepted in scientific circles, uncertainty about how to achieve this in practice remains. This prompts a growing need to better understand how willing these increasingly diverse range of landholders are in collaborating together.

To address this, this paper explores how collaborations consisting of a heterogenous mix of stakeholders might function, and the drivers and interventions required for such collaboration to be sustained in the long term. Utilising Q-methodology, we establish various models of collaboration based around the range perspectives of different stakeholders. Our findings yield five models of collaboration: the “Traditional Farmer”, “Social Farmer”, “Hybrid Collaboration”, “Modern Collaborators” and “Pragmatic Collaborators”. While distinction between the groups are reflected by the aspects of collaboration they placed most importance to, several commonalities in views have emerged as well. This includes the trust required between conservation groups and landholders for effective conservation outcomes, and the opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience in collaborations. Ultimately, the models of collaboration suggest a need for future policies to think more directly about how different landholders might be grouped according to their perspective on collaboration and how they can be incentivised. This will facilitate more effective, and sustained, landholder collaborations that fulfils landscape scale ambitions of upcoming policies.