Re-assessing Agrarian Policy and Practice in Local Environmental Management: The Case of Beef Cattle

There are policy pressures to make agriculture more environmentally sustainable and to give a more local expression to agri-environmental priorities. This paper considers these moves, with particular reference to the beef sector, and speculates on the further policy responses required to facilitate benign local agri-environmental management. The UK beef sector is characterized by its complexity and diversity but four major systems can be identified operating at varying levels of intensity. Of these, suckler herds and grass-rearing systems have long been associated with high natural value forms of agricultural land management. Many of the cherished habitats and landscapes of the UK are dependent upon grazing for their ecological and amenity value. However a combination of the BSE crisis, the strength of sterling and the recent Foot & Mouth epidemic threatens the sustainability of these high nature value grazing systems. The importance of grazing to fifty selected Sites of Special Scientific Interest is highlighted in the paper. Survey work identified a wide range of systems to be particularly vulnerable to changes in profitability in the beef sector, including: coastal grazing marsh, wet acidic grassland / marshland, upland moor and heath, calcareous grassland and neutral grassland. To maintain these systems requires agricultural policy to be more sensitive to local conditions than appears currently to be the case. There is little policy support for beef farmers in a regional context, still less giving special prominence to those farming within particular biotopes. Nor has there been sufficient policy encouragement to markets for traditional and local beef breeds. The continuing pressure for CAP reform offers further opportunity for policies to be devolved to regions and localities

Research on the Geography of Agricultural Change: Redundant or Revitalized?

Future research directions for agricultural geography were the subject of debate in Area in the late 1980s. The subsequent application of political economy ideas undoubtedly revived interest in agricultural research. This paper argues that agricultural geography contains greater diversity than the dominant political economy discourse would suggest. It reviews ‘other’ areas of agricultural research on policy, post-productivism, people, culture and animals, presenting future suggestions for research. They should ensure that agricultural research continues revitalized rather than redundant into the next millennium

The science of impact and the impact of agricultural science

Research impact and its measurement are of increasing importance. This is particularly significant for agricultural science, which is expected to produce solutions to future challenges that will arise from population growth, climate change and ecosystem degradation. Much econometric effort has been devoted to analysis of investment in agricultural research and its effects on farm productivity. This analysis, reviewed here, has produced a consensus suggesting that returns are high, although they are achieved only after long lags. However, policymakers perceive the occurrence of impacts as too few, and poorly targeted with respect to their needs. An attribution gap between the outcomes of agricultural research and how they reach farmers has motivated evaluation of the process of transmission and translation of agricultural research outputs into ultimate impacts. This gap can be narrowed by Participatory Impact Pathway Analysis, implemented mostly so far in low income countries. However, it is a costly and cognitively complex approach. Content analysis of the UK’s 2014 REF Impact Case Studies uncovers the mind set of researchers and their managers regarding the description of impact and how it is supposed to occur. This reveals a nascent conservatism that focuses on research that can be shown to have impact, rather than research impact itself. From the overall discussion it can be concluded that the impact evaluation of agricultural science raises more profound issues than either efficiency or transparency. Confirmation bias threatens impact evaluation, principally by distracting from other important stories about how and why the ultimate effects occur, but also by transforming the nature of the process itself. Methodological pluralism, with greater integration and triangulation between different evaluation approaches, is a promising means of resolving these problems

Poetry, painting and change on the edge of England

In this article we discuss our creative research on and with a contested coastal community on one of the UK's last existing plotlands, the humberston Fitties. Plotlands can be briefly defined as places where individuals have historically self‐built holiday houses. This 56‐acre strip of land with 319 chalets is on the Humber estuary and lies close to Cleethorpes, a seaside resort, and Grimsby, a seaport now facing post‐industrial decline. Our cross‐disciplinary collaborative practice between poetry and visual art explores open, environmentally aware engagements and methodologies with landscape and rural place. We investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics, looking out to land and sea and back to the community. Our results include original art and poetry presented innovatively together in exhibitions and books, in addition to local people's responses to our methodologies and the work itself

Property ownership, resource use, and the ‘gift of nature’

Through a theoretical and empirical consideration of gift exchange we argue in this paper that those with legal interests in land have constructed property relations around a claim of reciprocity with nature. This has been used to legitimate the ways in which they have deployed their property power to exclude others, thus seeking to retain their dominion over both humans and nonhumans. In so doing, however, people with such interests have failed to understand the dynamic of gift relationships, with their inherent inculcation of subject and other, to the point where the exercise of power becomes contingent on the continued hegemony of property relations. Using the politics of recreational access to inland waters in England and Wales, we show that power—over both humans and nonhumans—is temporary and conditional in ways that are not fully theorised in most contemporary debates about property rights and their deployment on nonhuman subjects

Blueprints for rural economy: Philip Lowe's work in rural and environmental social science

Philip Lowe died in February 2020, and so an academic career spanning five decades in environmental and rural social science and the sociology of knowledge came to an end. A pioneer of the social science of environmentalism since the early 1990s, Philip Lowe had been closely associated with the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University in the UK and had been the intellectual force behind establishing rural economy as both a subject and mode of social science analysis. This article reflects on a career and the evolving concept of ‘rural economy’ as an economic form, a policy realm and a knowledge practice. Through this history, it presents an account of the contribution of Philip Lowe's research and writing that, as a result of his death, now stands as a bounded and complete body of work for the benefit of future generations of scholars

Locality, Environment and Law: The Case of Town and Village Greens

In this paper we explore one type of commons - town and village greens - which are an important feature of the rural and, increasingly, the urban, English landscape. Greens are an ancient form of commons, but they are increasingly recognised as having contemporary significance, particularly because of their potential to act as a reservoir for natural resources and their enjoyment. They are, in other words, emerging out of a 'feudal box'. We focus on the fact that town and village greens are recognised in law by their association with a group of people defined by their physical proximity to the land which is to be registered. Although this does not in itself constitute a community, the law requires for the registration of land as a town or village green a certain degree of organisation and self-selection and this has in the past fostered both a sense of subjective belief in 'belonging', as well as exclusion (the rights of local people being potentially 'diluted' by the use of the land by those from outside the locality). As well as helping to produce and recognise community and community identity, then, commons may simultaneously produce the conditions for disassociation and exclusion. In this context, we consider how law defines and upholds notions of locality, and also the ways in which an increasingly powerful environmental discourse might be seen to challenge the primacy given to locality as a way of defining and creating greens and, more generally, the practical effects of this on how decisions are made about preserving these spaces as 'common'. We consider the scope of the public trust doctrine as providing an example of how law is capable of accommodating ideas of shared nature and natural resources, in this case providing a form of public ownership over natural resources. Whilst our analysis is rooted firmly in the law relating to town and village greens in England and Wales, this body of law displays certain important features more broadly applicable to a range of other types of common land, and raises more general issues about how law supports certain interests in land, often to the exclusion of others