Research strategy
The Landscape Research Group works to advance understanding of landscape, and to put that understanding to work on the questions that matter most to people and to place. Our research strategy sets out the approach we take and the priorities that guide what we publish, fund and convene.
We promote a landscape approach because it is holistic, dynamic and cultural. It treats people’s interaction with the world as something shaped by many disciplines, sectors and points of view at once, and it makes room for the different, and often competing, ways in which land and resources are understood and used.
That breadth is what makes the approach useful. The major challenges of our time, among them climate change, migration and population growth, the search for sustainable energy, large-scale ecological loss, and poverty and inequality, cut across every discipline. A landscape approach is one of the few that can hold them together.
Our research priorities
The strategy is expressed through a framework of twelve research themes, grouped into four families: Environment and change; Society, power and place; Landscape types and relationships; and Culture, knowledge and practice. These themes are not neatly bounded. They overlap and connect, and most substantial work sits across more than one.
The framework grew from four founding priorities that still run through everything we do: landscape justice, rapid environmental change, landscape governance, and critical and creative landscape thinking. They cut across individual disciplines and sectors, and they connect them.
Every item in the Landscape Exchange is organised by these themes, so the strategy is not only a statement of intent but the structure through which the work itself can be explored. You can read about each theme, or browse the Exchange by theme, region and format.
How the strategy is put to work
The strategy informs the annual theme of our Research Fund and the projects we choose to support, as well as the events and networks we convene. It is a living document, revisited as the field and the world around it change.
Read the full Research Strategy (PDF, 2.6MB).
To promote a multidisciplinary landscape approach to analysing and finding solutions to environmental problems, and to identifying and promoting those interactions with landscape that lead to human flourishing. This approach includes social and human considerations together with those of a biophysical nature.
Paul Tabbush, on the launch of the research strategy
Find out more
If you would like to know more about our research strategy, or to discuss how your own work connects with it, please write to us at research@landscaperesearch.org.