Landscape governance

Landscape governance concerns the rules, institutions and habits of decision by which land is planned, protected, allocated and managed. It covers formal instruments such as planning law, designation, agri-environment policy and the European Landscape Convention, and the less formal arrangements that often matter more in practice: customary rights, commons management, local agreements, and the working relationships between agencies, landowners and the people who live somewhere.

Research in this theme asks who holds authority over a landscape, on what evidence they act, and how far those affected can shape what happens. It takes in the technical apparatus of governance, from cadastral mapping to designation criteria, and the language in which schemes are justified, which often does more work than the policy behind it. This theme overlaps constantly with landscape justice, since how a decision is made is rarely separable from whom it serves.