Editorial: integrating local landscape management in a globalised world – practices and pathways

Abstract

© 2016 The royal danish Geographical society CONTACT simon swaffield swaffies@lincoln.ac.nz Urbanisation, population growth, limited land and environmental concerns are putting the world’s farmers under growing pressure to increase productivity in sustainable ways (Lambin & Meyfroidt, 2011). Policy responses include seeking greater efficiency of production and distribution through globalisation of technologies (Coleman, Grant, & Josling, 2004), intensification of farming systems (Reenberg & Fenger, 2011; Rudel et al., 2009), integration of global food networks (Dickson-Hoyle & Reenberg, 2009; Ericksen, 2008) and creation of more open markets (Anderson & Josling, 2005). At the same time, sustainability scientists warn of the environmental risks and consequences of agricultural intensification (Tilman, Cassman, Matson, Naylor, & Polasky, 2002); urban consumers demand higher moral and environmental standards in their food supply (Morgan, Marsden, & Murdoch, 2007); and society requires a growing range of material and non-material ecosystem services from production landscapes (Wratten, Sandhu, Cullen, & Costanza, 2013). At the local landscape level, farmers manage land as producers, owners and citizens (Primdahl & Kristensen, 2011; Primdahl, Kristensen, & Busck, 2013b). The way they do this and how they combine the three roles depends on the nature and locality of the biophysical landscape, the farmer’s own situation (full-time farmer, tenant farmer, lifestyle farmer and employed farm workers), the local community (or lack of it), the impacts of urbanisation upon peri-urban and rural landscapes (Orsini, 2013; Primdahl, Kristensen, & Swaffield, 2013a; Zasada, Fertner, Piorr, & Nielsen, 2011) and the farmers’ relationships with the wider market trends and policy agenda (Plieninger & Beiling, 2012; Primdahl & Swaffield, 2010). Thus, the ways that agricultural landscapes are structured and function vary enormously, even within the developed world, and these diverse processes and relationships raise significant policy design and implementation questions about how to effectively integrate efficient global food supply systems with sustainable management of local landscapes as settings for living, working and service provision (Primdahl & Swaffield, 2010; Primdahl et al 2013b; Swaffield & Primdahl, 2014; Termorshuizen & Opdam, 2009). One common feature, however, is that the links between local landscapes and the rest of the world are becoming increasingly complex and interrelated (BirchThomsen & Kristensen, 2005; Mertz, Wadley, & Christensen, 2005). Globalisation means that decisions and practices in particular landscapes become relatively less related to local and regional contexts, and increasingly linked to (affecting and affected by) decisions and practices in other distal landscapes (Reenberg & Primdahl, 2009). Land use in an urbanised world is becoming telecoupled (Seto & Reenberg, 2014), and local landscapes increasingly become linked to multi-dimensional networks organised as non-nested hierarchies (Swaffield & Primdahl, 2006). As a consequence of this, the relationships between local landscape management practices and market processes, public policies and business decisions occurring at other scales become disjointed and asymmetrical. This in turn means that policy problems associated with local agricultural landscapes become harder to define, with neither straightforward nor ‘optimal’ solutions. In short, they become ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973).