Pathways to resilient futures: distilling principles to guide landscape policy decisions

Abstract

New Zealand landscapes are changing from both local and global economic drivers with contemporary changes causing conflicts tensions and unease as different interests assert their understandings, ideologies, meanings and interpretations at the local landscape level. Regional councils and territorial local authorities have to deal with challenges of managing natural and physical resources, and in particular landscapes, in this rapidly changing environment. To manage, they require stable principles of landscape change decision making acceptable to a range of stakeholders and, applicable at landscape policy level and at the everyday landscape level. Using an interpretive case study of Central Otago, three alternative futures of landscape change were presented to key informants to provoke decision making on landscape change. Through a reflexive inquiry and discourse analysis the key informants’ accounts were analysed and compared with literature, and the findings and their theoretical and policy implications are discussed. The findings show that, one, principles of landscape change decision making are expressed, and conceptually framed around three categories; substantive, governance and process types, and three levels of specificity; generic, benchmark and operational. Two, there are significant tensions, gaps and tactical silences in these principles, and three, landscape change is a discursive work framed by among other things competing discourses, power and scale relations. Key policy implications include first, managing adaptively to account for episodic nature of change including dysfunction and obsolescence, second, expressing policy goals at the landscape level and third, ensuring continuity of community engagement. The latter two, it is suggested, are met through local landscape strategy making.