Narratives in nature: The challenge of managing conflict and collaboration in cultural landscapes

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Cultural landscapes are changing due to a range of different, interacting drivers such as land abandonment, agricultural intensification, and climate change. This makes it difficult but also very important to manage and preserve their biological and cultural values. However, there are significant differences in how various stakeholders perceive a cultural landscape is perceived and what values they consider a priority. So once again the question is how to manage cultural landscapes and how to address the impacts of land use change…

Ongoing land use change, in particular the abandonment of farmland and the intensification of agriculture, knowingly threatens biodiversity and ecosystem health, but also results in loss of traditional cultural landscapes – and this is often overseen. Nevertheless, cultural landscapes are just as important because they result from a co-evolution of humans and nature, making them considerable social-ecological systems. We associate a wide variety of values with these landscapes, meaning that they have many subjective and diverse interpretations and meanings. While plurality and diversity is often essential (read more here), it also poses challenges to preserve cultural landscapes: How do we deal with different stakeholder perceptions in management? How do we integrate diverging viewpoints in governance? How do we address multiple interests and values in decision-making?

There might me an answer: Narratives! Narratives provide a conceptual lens to identify different perceptions of issues and to reveal underlying beliefs, priorities, and values. They are shared interpretations and meanings assigned to certain cultural landscapes. As storylines, they can help understand land-use conflicts and different viewpoints by emphasizing what is perceived to be the right course of action or management.

Narratives reveal the underlying beliefs, priorities, and values of their storytellers, which helps in managing cultural landscapes.
(Source: iStock)

Of course, just as perceptions of cultural landscapes differ, so do landscape narratives: How do stakeholders characterize the landscape? How do they appreciate it? What do they perceive as threats in the narratives? These different problem-framings present a barrier for collaborative management and effective decision-making.

Future research should focus on participatory vision development to help address narrative tensions and bring different landscape narratives together. A resulting more integrative perspective would better include cultural aspects and provide direction for future planning and management.

If you want to explore this topic further, you can find the whole paper HERE.

Schaal-Lagodzinski, T., König, B., Riechers, M., Heitepriem, N. & Leventon, J. (2024) Exploring cultural landscape narratives to understand challenges for collaboration and their implications for governance, Ecosystems and People, 20:1, 2320886, DOI: 10.1080/26395916.2024.2320886

Text by Isabelle Andres

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