Mapping and Deliberating Public Values for Uplands Management in Scotland

The Scottish Government, through the Land Use Strategies and ongoing land reform initiatives, has committed simultaneously to increasing land-based climate mitigation, and democratising and devolving decision making to the landscape level through the Regional Land Use Partnerships initiative. Regional Partnerships are intended to ‘deliver a step change in the way land use decisions are made – to deliver improved outcomes at the pace and scale needed to meet the challenge of climate and environment targets, support economic recovery and renewal and take a more effective joined up approach to land use planning’ (Scottish Land Commission, no date; p.2). However, research is required to better understand effective ways for publics to engage with land use change (LUC) issues in order to support the governance of woodland expansion, land-based mitigation, and more generally, Scottish land reform. The context of historical alienation from the land makes this particularly pertinent, as there is not a uniform culture of strong public engagement in land use planning (Wightman, 1999; Cocker, 2018; Glass et al. 2019). In addition, contested decision making and outright land use conflicts characterise the UK upland environment (St John et al. 2019; Kirkup et al. 2016; Woodland Expansion Advisory Group, 2012), further increasing the challenge of governing change. Within this context, this PhD will evaluate different models of public engagement around land use, and particularly woodland expansion. This meets a demand for research articulated by Hamish Trench, Chief Executive of the Scottish Land Commission, of the need to test different models of public engagement with LUC to inform land governance. This PhD will be complementary, and develop in parallel, to Fisher’s recently funded NERC Landscape Decisions Fellowship (Developing a Toolkit for Mapping and Deliberating Values for Uplands Management). It will also be undertaken in partnership with collaborators at Nature.Scot (formerly Scottish Natural Heritage) and the Scottish Land Commission.

Key RQs:

1. What are the current debates about upland land uses within public realms, and what aspects are particularly consensual or contentious?
2. What are the current constraints to the engagement of different Scottish publics with planning the use of the uplands?
3. With reference to a case or cases, which methods of public engagement with land use planning are effective and in what ways?
4. With reference to a case or cases, do processes exist which can help ameliorate contention in public debates about the future of the uplands?

Methodology:
The methods are organised in relation to the numbering of indicative research questions:
1. Literature synthesis; expert elicitation, and possibly discursive analysis of media content.
2. Literature synthesis including understanding the historical situation regarding the relationship of people and land; expert elicitation.
3 and 4 (methods in common):
In the early phase of work, the PhD researcher will undertake a thorough literature survey of the range of methods available for public engagement with LUC, and methods for conflict amelioration in land use planning. This will also be complemented by a survey/brief round of expert interviews (within policy and research – identified via networks of the supervisorial team and the Centre for Sustainable Forests and Landscapes). Then, within a case study design (case studies likely to be chosen in common with Fisher’s NERC landscape decisions fellowship), the PhD will implement and test a few carefully scoped and chosen methods of public engagement with land use planning. These will be evaluated against a number of participatory and researcher-led criteria, including their potential for conflict amelioration. A few of the most suitable methods from the following list will be identified to be tested and evaluated: scenario exploration (drawing upon for instance, localised versions of Burton et al.’s (2019) national scale visions for woodland expansion or Reed et al.’s (2009) uplands scenarios); deliberative valuation (Raymond et al, 2014); visualisation; values mapping using Q methodology (common to Fisher’s Fellowship); landscape visualisation tools (for instance the LANDPREF tool (Sing et al (2019)); games and role play activities; and other methods identified through systematic literature search. This work may be assisted by the close collaboration of a professional facilitator (engaged and costed within Fisher’s Fellowship work in the same landscapes). The outputs of this research will be disseminated in ways suited to inform the future of the governance of the uplands in Scotland, the UK and beyond.