Presentation short abstract

Research from a culturally-embed UK upland explores farming communities emotions during policy driven land use change. Lack of agency and loss of people-place relationships are compounding fear and mistrust. Understanding lived experiences supports environmental justice in conservation practice.

Presentation long abstract

Landscape restoration can evoke strong emotional reactions from impacted communities when connections to place are perceived or actively threatened by land use change. For example, land use change in UK uplands is highly contested, in-part a result of culturally embedded farming communities as well as historical legacies of landownership and power imbalance. Research from one of the UK’s largest nature recovery partnerships, Cumbria Connect, is exploring the links between our emotional connection to place and our attitudes towards nature restoration, exploring this pathway through lens of values, identity and power. Shifts in UK agri-environment policy to focus on public good outcomes has resulted in trends of landowners returning farm tenancies in-house to deliver nature recovery. Feelings of fear and mistrust are exacerbated by the collective traumatic experience of loss of these farming communities. Farmers and rural communities hold multi-generational connections to the land underpinning their sense of self and livelihoods. Furthermore, we report a lack of recognitional justice in which emotions can be dismissed by practitioners with limited meaningfully incorporation of dimensions of lived experiences in local decision-making. In this talk we bring together research exploring farmers relational values towards land, landscape and community, as well as a photo elicitation study of resident’s sense of place, to understand perspectives of positive and negative land use changes. We discuss ways to utilise these strong place-based and emotionally centred relationships between people and the land to enrich and re-define this connection within nature, climate and public good outcomes for enabling transformative change.