Lars Hallgren

Farmers and nature conservation: What is known about attitudes, context factors and actions affecting conservation?

Farmers’ attitudes towards viability of specific conservation practices or actions strongly impact their decisions on adoption and change. This review of ‘attitude’ information reveals a wide range of perceptions about what conservation means and what the impacts of adoption will mean in economic and environmental terms. Farmers operate in a tight financial situation, and in parts of the world they are highly dependent on government subsidies, and cannot afford to risk losing that support. Use of conservation practices is most effective when these are understood in the context of the individual farm, and decisions are rooted in land and resource stewardship and long-term concerns about health of the farm and the soil. The attitudes of farmers entering agri-environmental schemes decide the quality of the result. A model is developed to show how attitudes of the farmer, the farming context and agri-environmental schemes interact and thus influence how the farming community affects nature and biodiversity. As new agri-environmental schemes are planned, agricultural development specialists need to recognize the complexity of farmer attitudes, the importance of location and individual farmer circumstances, and the multiple factors that influence decisions. We provide these insights and the model to conservation biologists conducting research in farming areas, decision makers who develop future agri-environmental schemes, educators training tomorrow’s extension officers and nature conservationists, and researchers dealing with nature conservation issues through a combination of scientific disciplines.

Adaptive management? Observations of knowledge coordination in the communication practice of Swedish game management

Modern management of natural resources is guided by the normative theory of adaptive management (AM). Behind this theory lies a strong, albeit implicit, expectation that organisations aiming for AM have the capacity to communicate in a way that facilitates the required coordination of the knowledge perspectives involved. The aim of this article is to discuss the extent to which the communication practice of Swedish game management organisations facilitates coordination of knowledge corresponding to AM. Based on operationalizations of communicative rationality and agonistic pluralism, we use the concepts ‘discursive closure’ and ‘discursive opening’ to investigate how the coordination of knowledge is carried out through communication in relatively recently established organisations, the Swedish Game Management Delegations (GMDs). We analyse four communication episodes from GMD meetings and notice that multiple perspectives were expressed (discourse openings) but were not evaluated in a communicative rational way before being closed. The consequences of these closures were that knowledge perspectives with potential relevance, but with unclear validity for game management, were not elaborated upon, in terms of their truth, intelligibility, legitimacy or sincerity, which inhibited AM. The concepts of discursive closure and discursive opening proved useful for investigating communicative capacity. An important question which needs to be addressed to improve communicative capacity for AM is whether it would be practically possible to keep to the agenda and rules of the GMD meetings and still admit discursive openings about differences in perspectives.

Managing Impressions and Forests: The Importance of Role Confusion in Co-Creation of a Natural Resource Conflict

Social interaction is an important—and often forgotten—aspect of conflicts in natural resource management (NRM). Building on the theoretical framework of symbolic interaction, this article explores how the concept of impression management during social interaction can help understand NRM conflicts. A qualitative study was carried out on a Swedish case involving a conflict over clear-cutting of a forest. To explain why the conflict escalated and destructivity increased, we investigated how the involved actors interpreted each others actions. For an individual, role confusion occurs when a particular interaction creates a conflict between the presented self and the self expected from the social situation (Goffman 1956). The analysis shows that actors could not use their established social arenas to address dissatisfaction due to the fear of role confusion. Instead, they avoided informal face-to-face meetings and changed the conditions of the social situation to avoid role confusion.

Farmers' Interest in Nature and Its Relation to Biodiversity in Arable Fields

Biodiversity declines in farmland have been attributed to intensification of farming at the field level and loss of heterogeneity at the landscape level. However, farmers are not solely optimizing ...

Stakeholder Interaction in Participatory Land Restoration in Iceland: Environmental Officers' Challenges and Strategies

Participatory approaches involve stakeholder interaction but environmental agency employees engaged in participatory undertakings often lack training for interaction tasks. This study explored how district officers at the Soil Conservation Service of Iceland (SCSI) experienced and dealt with stakeholder interaction in participatory land restoration. We made semi-structured interviews with all district officers with at least 1-year experience; seven in total. A thematic content analysis revealed five challenges facing the officers in their interaction activities and seven strategies that they used to deal with these challenges. The core challenge was to establish and maintain contacts with farmers and other stakeholders as it enabled the SCSI to support and influence their land restoration practices. Other challenges were to: accomplish SCSI’s objectives; represent the SCSI and the government; have adequate skills, knowledge, and background; and deal with ones own emotions. Four of the strategies seemed to promote collaboration: create win–win scenarios; “go local”; direct and positive communication; and motivation and knowledge sharing. The other strategies: supportive district officer team; self-reliance and personal background; and self-control supported the officers in their interaction tasks. Factors undermining their collaboration efforts included insufficient time and other resources, an unsupportive organizational culture and a legal duty to assess the condition of vegetation cover on farmland. Increased resource allocation to the SCSI’s local operations, more attention to emotional issues, and efforts to develop a more flexible and learning organizational culture that supports collaboration could counteract these factors.