By Fay Kahane, Melissa Ralph, and Rosalind Shaw.

Planning for future-proof urban green spaces. These four ‘pathways’ can inform site selection and design to enable effective ongoing stewardship. Photo credit: “Making Space for Nature”. 

Read the full paper here

England and the devolved UK nations, along with much of Europe, are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. UK local governments have a legal duty to increase biodiversity in green spaces across towns and cities, alongside peoples’ health and wellbeing. ‘Effective stewardship’ of urban green spaces increases biodiversity, reduces flooding, makes people happier and healthier, and generates opportunities for business. However, inappropriate (or lack of) management can increase social and ecological inequity; excluding both people (e.g. through lack of path maintenance or social intimidation) and wildlife (e.g. removing native ‘weeds’ and in turn insects, birds and mammals). It’s therefore important to understand what causes effective stewardship.

We studied 25 publicly-accessible green spaces in 9 towns across Cornwall, England. These sites had been enhanced for people and wildlife through a local government-led project, and we wanted to investigate which were ‘effectively stewarded’ after project end… and why. We gave each site a score; combining measures of local government management budget and community action, inclusion of diverse perspectives, and biodiversity and social gain. We then looked at what was the same and what was different across the sites with a high score, and across those with a lower score. Through 138 on-site interviews and online research, combined with biodiversity and landscape assessments, we found five social and ecological ‘conditions’ that influenced the likelihood of effective stewardship:

  • Neighbourhood capacity (deprivation level, and presence of volunteer gardening groups already nearby)
  • Landscape quality (e.g. far-reaching views, mature trees, heritage features)
  • Relations between residents and local government (especially historic tensions)
  • ‘Sense of place’ (people’s emotional bonds with the site)
  • Financial input (relative cost of the completed enhancement works)

Through a rigorous Qualitative Comparative Analysis we found four ‘pathways’ (combinations of conditions) that enabled effective ongoing stewardship (see infographic), along with three pathways that made it very difficult. This can help focus local government policies and plans around setting the scene for effective stewardship into the future.

Effective stewardship can be enabled at lower cost in higher capacity neighbourhoods with high landscape quality. Financial input becomes key in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but political narratives can detract from this need. Furthermore, historic tensions between residents and local government can make effective stewardship very difficult. We found a thorough understanding of how residents’ value their green space to be crucial – be it for community sports, pride around well-tended flowerbeds, or reverence for unkempt biodiversity. Our findings indicate opinions around ‘tidiness’ and ‘mess’ are changing and needn’t be mutually exclusive – so long as ‘cues to care’ (especially regular, targeted mowing) are apparent. This suggests urban green spaces could act as grounded ’reconciliation sites’ to mediate polarised narratives.