Meri Juntti

Interpreting and reinterpreting agri-environmental policy: Communication, trust and knowledge in the implementation process

The role and importance of street-level bureaucrats in policy implementation is now widely recognised. So far as the EUs agri-environmental policy is concerned, however, a focus on the attitudes and behaviour of programme recipients (farmers and other land managers) has tended to obscure the role of street-level bureaucrats responsible for extending and advising on schemes and the impact of their interpretive frameworks and communication practices on policy outcomes. This paper draws on interviews with extensionists and advisers in England and Finland in order to explore the different interpretations, which these actors bring to the implementation of agrienvironmental policy and to reflect on the implications of this for the way environmental advice is currently being offered to farmers within the agri-environmental network.

Introduction to rural planning.

Part 1: Ruruality, Planning and Governance 1. Introduction 2. Rural Governance and Spatial Planning Part 2: The Rural Economy 3. Economic Change 4. The Farming Economy 5. New Economies Part 3: The Needs of Rural Communities 6. Community Change 7. Rural Housing: Demand, Supply, Affordability and the Market 8. Living in the Countryside Part 4: Environmental Change and Planning 9. A Changing Environment 10. A Differentiated Environment Part 5: Governance, Coordination and Integration 11. (Re) Positioning Rural Areas 12. Conclusions: Integrating Agendas, Coordinating Responses

Introduction to rural planning: Economies, communities and landscapes

Introduction to Rural Planning provides a critical analysis of the key challenges facing rural places and the various ways that public policy and community action can shape outcomes, structured around three major themes: economies, communities and landscapes. Its thematic chapters examine key ideas influencing various forms of intervention before considering ‘rural planning’ processes and outcomes in Britain. The second edition of this student text book has been extensively re-written to provide far greater coverage of key policy areas and questions. New features include: • A re-examination of the mixed nature of rural planning, concluding that it is an amalgam of public land-use planning, spatial or territorial planning, community action, countryside management and the projects and programmes of national and supra-national agencies and organisations. Together, these components of ‘composite’ rural planning have a transformative influence on rural places; • A broader analysis of entrepreneurial social action as a shaper of outcomes, particularly in the fields of rural development, service provision, transport and housing. A far greater emphasis is placed on planning at a community scale, with particular coverage of the localism agenda and Neighbourhood Planning in England; • A focus on accessibility and rural transport provision, examining the governance arrangements needed to deliver integrated solutions spanning urban and rural places. Accessibility is re-presented as a major dilemma facing the countryside, leading to questions of rural sustainability and critical challenges around service access and delivery; • An examination of the ecosystem approach to environmental planning, linking the procurement of ecosystem services to the global challenges of habitat degradation and loss, climate change and resource scarcity and management. Important links are made between this approach and the re-emergence of food security questions; and • An evaluation of the currency of the ‘rural’ label in the context of global urbanisation, concluding that rural spaces are relational spaces characterised by critical production and consumption tensions. This book aims to make sense of current rural challenges and planning approaches. It will be a valuable resource for students on planning, rural development and rural geography courses. Nick Gallent is Professor of Housing and Planning and Head of the Bartlett School of Planning at UCL. Iqbal Hamiduddin is Lecturer in Transport and Housing at the Bartlett. Meri Juntti is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Governance and Rural Development in the Department of Law and Politics at Middlesex University. Sue Kidd and Dave Shaw are both in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool, where Sue is a Senior Lecturer and Head of Planning and Dave is a Professor of Planning.

Land-Use Continuity: Farmland and Old Wineries

This chapter explores cases of rural land investment that deliver continuity in land-use but bring new motives and practices to established rural activities. These cases include the following: (1) the acquisition of the Sella & Mosca Winery in Sardinia, first by Campari in the 2000s and more recently by Holding Terra Moretti. (2) Investment in United Kingdom farming by the industrial entrepreneur James Dyson, through his Beeswax Company. (3) The consolidation of horticultural activity in Almeria, Spain, by larger local and international operators. (4) The Wellcome Trust’s investment in UK farming in support of its medical research goals. (5) The use of investment funds to support ‘leaseback’ farming operations in Eastern Europe.

The Changing Nature of Investment in Rural Assets

Themes explored in this chapter include rural land investment, acquisition and consolidation. The chapter addresses five questions. First, what have been the recent patterns of rural land acquisition and consolidation, particularly those driven by new investors? Second, what approaches characterise investment, passive and indirect or active and direct? Third, who are the investors in rural land? Fourth, what are the motives behind investment in rural land assets? Fifth, and finally, how do investment motives and strategies link to emerging place-based impacts? The big question tackled here is who is investing in rural land assets and for what reason. The chapter flags the profit-seeking nature of land investment (and financialisation) alongside personal motivations.

Assessing the Impacts of Investment

The propensity of investors and investment to impact, for good or bad, on local economies, environments and on communities will depend, to a large extent, on the transformations in land-use and economic activity that those investments bring, as well as the extent to which local assets are engaged in new, locally embedded activities. This chapter has four aims: first, to scope the sorts of impacts that are examined in the case studies; second, to review the ways in which different impacts might be conceived and measured; third, to outline the framework for assessing investment impacts adopted in this research; and fourth, to explain how the gathered data for this study were interpreted.

Land-Use Transformations: Leisure, Bio-energy and New Wineries

The cases presented in this chapter examine investments that have underpinned transformative change in their respective rural economies and landscapes, beginning with Donald Trump’s investment in the Menie Estate, Scotland, and his project to deliver a world-ranking golf resort on one of Scotland’s most sensitive and important coastlines is considered. The second case study is an examination of the creation and operation of Moominworld in Naantali, Finland. Three further studies then track the growth of the biogas industry in Northern Ireland and its potential to raise and stabilise farm incomes, the development of the wine industry in southern England with investment from continental wine producers and, finally, the cultivation of willow in Finland for the production of biochar, used in soil improvement and water purification.