RELU : Rural Economy and Land Use

Discussion

Main points of the workshop highlighted by:
John Thomson, Scottish Natural Heritage, LUPG
Hilary Aldridge, Environment Agency, LUPG

Broad Lessons
• We are dealing with a complexity of issues
• There are cultural divides between disciplines
• Different disciplines start from different assumptions
• We must be dynamic as we are very much in a constantly changing world
• Data needs to be made freely available. Although there are issues to resolve: if data is freely available, how do you pay for it to be gathered and managed?
• Competitiveness is an obstacle to interdisciplinary work – how do we harness interdisciplinary work appropriately to be effectively used in this context?
• Whatever your discipline – understanding how humans behave is important.
• How do we deal with conflict, how do we move beyond our normal networks in order to have effective research? Conflict should not be avoided.
• Policy makers know that there are issues around scale, locality and degrees of detail. How can communication be best achieved between researchers and policy makers in order to make research meaningful and useful at different scales?
• In this context, researchers and policy makers must be more honest and open about failures .

Messages for Researchers
• People outside of academia expect the experts to work together.
• Must be careful to avoid the danger of making interdisciplinarity itself became a disciplinary occupation.
• In the context of research – a critical review process is important.
• The policy community recognise that work/perceptions on people’s behaviour/attitude are important.
• It is important to try to translate environmental values into political debate (i.e. money).
• Policy makers don’t want detail – they want the key messages.
• Policy makers want to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, what are the trends and driving forces. A lot of the modelling and scenario building is very valuable.
• When disseminating messages from research, it is important to present this in a digestible form. This came across strongly from discussion sessions in terms of dissemination to wider public.
• Terminology and use of language must be carefully chosen in order to keep it understandable and approachable and avoid jargon.
• It is important to engage stakeholders. How much are we joining up stakeholders work? Why are we engaging stakeholders – what is the purpose, what is the value? How can we bring together learning from different projects as far as stakeholders are concerned?
• We need clear links between actors and outcome. For example one worry in the context of WFD policy making, is that once policy makers ask a range of actors to sign up to a plan this will cost a lot of money. How do we know that the work we are asking stakeholders to carry out will have the appropriate outcome?

Hopes for RELU
• RELU can play an important role in making research be more policy relevant.
• Interdisciplinary work can provide a platform for a move towards a “place-base” for policy. This move is exciting for policy makers.
• Landscape as an integrating framework is exciting. This approach can provide tools for study.
• RELU can provide a “dating agency” for people nationally and internationally in different disciplines.
• The interdisciplinary issue opens up a lot of talk about the difficulties involved. However it is important to remember the opportunities that this work opens up. The agencies are joining up their functions with the integrated agency http://www.defra.gov.uk/rural/strategy/factsheets/integrated_agency.htm. In RELU, there needs to be definition of where we are going, what we are trying to achieve.
• It would be really useful to identify the real lessons learnt: What went right / what went wrong / what went really wrong?
• How do we take the learning from RELU into other arenas e.g. to wider world, policy makers to help make decisions, which are underpinned by science.

Take home messages for LUPG agencies
• Large amounts of data needs analysing and collecting. This needs time. Interdisciplinary work requires time, communication and trust. Policy makers need to recognise the need for this (but researchers must not be too perfectionist).
• Policy makers are becoming interdisciplinary agencies and the issues in RELU apply to the agencies themselves.
• There was a lot of enthusiasm in the research community for this work but some of the systems in place in academia don’t support this (such as the RAE). Policy makers need to challenge government about this.
• It is important to bridge the gap between scientists and policy makers. The agencies need to find ways, such as the workshop today, of engaging with the research community.
• Some areas of research produce new ideas but there does need to be a clearer link between the science and the policy. For example, how can LUPG influence and steer the 3rd call of research in RELU.

Hilary Aldridge
“There is huge amount of research to tap into. I hope we can build on this sort of session to make correct policy decisions.”

John Lloyd Jones, Countryside Council for Wales
“Since I have been involved in RELU I feel that the only way we can cover large landscape issues is through interdisciplinary processes. The logic is difficult to understand because it is complex. We all make decisions from a variety of viewpoints and we need to recognise this in our research…
Only through interdisciplinary research can we get a handle on changes in perception over time. We need to avoid bad decision making that we will regret.
To address the problems identified in RELU properly we have to go further than the science –the cultural, social and spiritual aspects must all be considered.”