By Luis Gerardo Sanchez Soto.
By Luis Gerardo Sánchez Soto, George Holmes, and David R Williams.
People see agricultural landscapes as a solution to many issues, including biodiversity loss and environmental decline along with multiple pressing social issues. As a result, agricultural landscapes face increasing pressures to produce food, support wildlife, and deliver many other services. Meeting these demands require farming landscapes to change, impacting the way they look, the services they provide and the way people interact with them. While we know how different landscape-scale conservation approaches impact measurable targets like food production and biodiversity, we don’t know enough about how they will impact other benefits people get from them. To understand this, we set out to explore the diversity of perspectives that people have around farming landscapes, focusing on the views of people who live and work in arable landscapes of Norfolk, England.
We used a technique called ‘Q methodology’ in which we asked people to rank and discuss a set of images of things that can be found in Norfolk’s countryside. We included images of farming and other land use practices, conservation features in farmland (like hedges or ponds), habitat types, wildlife, and social activities in the countryside, and asked people to rank them based on what they wanted to see in the landscape.
We found that people’s views were diverse, yet they grouped around three broad perspectives prioritising specific objectives: (1) nature recovery and conservation management; (2) ensuring ‘good’ land is farmed productively and sensibly; and (3) providing opportunities for engagement in the countryside. We found various areas with conflicting views, such as species reintroductions and low-management conservation, or the benefits and costs of public access to farmland and nature. People also understood and valued nature differently, based on their values and their relationship with it. However, we also found shared principles across perspectives, such as a strong sense of responsibility for looking after the land and nature in it, even if they disagreed on how to do it.
Our findings provide useful guidance so that conservation policy can create fair and effective strategies that account for the diverse values of the people who live in and care about these places.
Relational Thinking 