A place to disagree: using social science methods for engaging communities and exploring contestation in changing landscapes

Environmental, social and political factors continuously exert forces of change on places. In the UK currently, there is an increasing sense that the way land is managed needs to change – and urgently – to deliver for people and nature on multiple fronts: food, infrastructure, housing, energy provision, carbon sequestration, access to nature for health and wellbeing, space for nature in its own right, and more.

Directives from central government – like the Land Use Framework, Local Nature Recovery Strategies, and Landscape Recovery schemes – signal a clear intent to catalyse large-scale change in the management of this finite resource. The assumption at the heart of these policy interventions, implied or explicit, is that places will change as a result.

Given the unavoidable personal and political implications of (prospective or actual) place-based change, we should accept that disagreement between different parties – on how land should be managed and to what end – will be more or less inevitable as governmental and non-governmental bodies try to affect change under the umbrella of nature restoration.

This paper advocates for moving away from consensus as a default aim in environmental engagement and negotiation processes, and instead proposes the use of social science methods to support people to disagree well in contentious restoration contexts. The Restoration Partnership Development (RPD) toolkit, developed by the author with colleagues from the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, is a user friendly and adaptable tool designed to help stakeholders with diverse viewpoints discuss challenging and sensitive issues around nature and land management, including identifying areas of consensus and potential conflict. Incorporating such approaches into engagement processes can help proactively identify risk, increase stakeholder buy-in, build relationships and generate useful insight into stakeholders priorities – in turn making nature restoration projects more fair, effective and place-sensitive.

Key themes

Place, nature, land management, engagement, perspectives, relationships, priorities, conflict, consensus

Annette Green is a postdoctoral research associate working for the Centre for Landscape Regeneration, at the University of Cambridge. She is a political ecologist interested in how beliefs about society and nature underpin conservation strategy- and decision-making. She is currently conducting social science research into diverse perspectives on land management and nature in complex restoration landscapes in the UK, and aims for her research to support restoration projects to be fairer and more effective.