New Land Managers: opportunities for delivering public goods through collaborative conservation

A shift in the scale and ambition of a new suite of agri-environmental policies in the UK, towards delivering public goods on a landscape scale, is occurring in the midst of changing land occupancy patterns in the countryside. The central contention of this thesis is that the emergence of ‘new land managers’ – many of whom appear equally well-placed as main occupation farmers to deliver public goods – needs to be seized as an opportunity by policymakers for promoting more collaborative and landscape scale conservation. The challenge thus lies in the ability of future schemes to recruit a broader range of landholders than, at present, into these collaborations. However, the make-up and motivations of these new land managers remains poorly understood, following decades long hiatus in research investigating structural changes in agriculture. In this thesis, we first draw on a survey and key-informant interviews with land agents to better understand the trends and drivers shaping the rural land market and the characteristics of what we term “new land managers”. The work proceeds to establish various models of collaboration, drawing on outputs from the Q-methodology conducted with land managers themselves, to assess how an increasingly diverse land management community might in future be engaged with and can work together in collaboration. Our findings suggest a continued restructuring of the agriculture industry, and the countryside overall, due to longstanding pressures and the implications of the shifting agriculture policy agenda. The result is a growing heterogeneity of landholder groups managing land in increasingly diverse ways and have values and motivations that are different to farmers. Our various models of collaboration also point to a need for future policies to think more directly about how this diversifying land management community might be grouped, and incentivised, into collaborative conservation according to their perspectives. We conclude that policymakers would need to deliver a suite of interventions specifically tailored to the various types of landholders to ensure an effective, and collaborative, delivery of public goods under the new Environmental Land Management schemes.Open Acces