The changing regulatory environment for speculative housebuilding and the construction of core competencies for brownfleld development

Speculative housebuilding in the United Kingdom faces an ever tighter regulatory environment owing to the increasing impact of the sustainable development agenda. For example, 60% of all new homes in England are now expected to be constructed on previously developed land or provided through the conversion of existing buildings. As speculative housebuilders are responsible for about 80% of all new dwellings built in the United Kingdom, the achievement of this important government target is critically dependent on the ability and willingness of the private sector to respond to public policy. By exploring the main components of the residential development process, the author investigates how far speculative housebuilding will need to change to ensure the successful implementation of the government's brownfield housing target. He suggests that those speculative housebuilders that are enthusiastically building up core competencies in brownfield housing are likely to emerge as the market leaders of the future whereas those companies that continue to rely on past practices and technologies will face an uncertain future as greenfield development opportunities begin to reduce

Conserving English landscapes: Land managers and agri-environmental policy

There is increasing public policy interest in the management of rural landscapes for conservation, both in terms of natural and cultural heritage. Agri-environmental policies are an important part of an emerging vision for a sustainable countryside, with increasing support for the existing Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) and Countryside Stewardship (CS) schemes. This paper provides insight into the nature of land-manager attitudes towards the conservation of rural landscapes and how these relate to differing modes and levels of engagement with these two schemes. It is based on the results of a recently completed project exploring the attitudes and practices of 100 land managers towards features of landscape and historic interest. Agri-environmental research has often sought to 'typologies' attitudes and practices around discrete land-manager types; an approach that may downgrade commonalities between land managers, the potential interplay of elements defining these types, and the possibility that land-manager identities may not be uniform. In this paper, in contrast, we emphasis the significance of these three analytical issues surrounding land- manager attitudes and practices. We explore land managers' interest and investment in conservation and go on to explain how these concerns were often closely related to the wildlife, historic and aesthetic goals of the schemes. The analysis then considers in detail how a concern for conservation often came to interplay with economic concerns to produce different attitudes and practices. We term these 'styles of participation and nonparticipation' to emphasise that such modes of uptake are not necessarily associated with specific land-manager types. Land managers developed these attitudes and practices with respect to different parts of their farms, types of landscape feature, and scheme in question. We conclude by emphasising the importance of contextualised analyses of land-manager values, knowledges, and practices for exploring the nature and possibilities of a 'sustainable countryside', and the role of agri-environmental policy within this policy vision of rural areas

Cost-benefit analysis and environmental policymaking

The author's purpose is to review the use of cost - benefit analysis (CBA) in environmental policy appraisal, focusing on the United Kingdom. Examples of the use of CBA in this context are provided, and the recent historical background to its use explained. The main strengths and weaknesses of CBA from the viewpoint of users are then reviewed, and alternatives to CBA are considered. The author closes by exploring some possible ways forward for the methodology which would be consistent with it becoming more useful and more widely accepted

Rights, symbolic violence and the micro-politics of the rural: the case of the Parish Paths Partnership scheme

In this paper microlevel politics and conflict associated with social and economic change in the countryside and linked changes in rural governance are explored with a focus upon research carried out on a recent rural policy initiative aimed at local 'empowerment'. This acts as a touchstone for a wider theoretical discussion. The paper is theorised within a conceptual framework derived and extended from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and others in order to explore case studies of the English Countryside Commission's Parish Paths Partnership scheme. The micropolitics involved with this scheme are examined and used to highlight more general issues raised by increased 'parish empowerment' in the 'postrural'