A new year, a new flurry of reports. I open them hoping for novel insight that will provide a key to unlocking our most critical challenges.  And almost always, despite my longing to be more appreciative, they trigger my inner critic…

Systems thinkers will recognise the problem. The pathway to net zero? What about biodiversity? Climate and nature? What about health? Environment and health? What about social justice and equity?

But shouldn’t we identify the most pressing problem and “focus focus focus” on solving that one, without distraction? 

Aging systems thinkers like me will recognise THAT problem.  When you’ve been through many political cycles, you remember well the discomfort that comes when having focussed on fixing one problem you’re faced with the unforeseen, unintended (or plain ignored) consequences.  

The government is now deep in this dilemma. Even with missions and milestones setting out their intentions for this parliament, the uncomfortable truth is you still need to balance one policy objective against another, in the white heat of real-life delivery.  

Mission clarity certainly helps. But in communities and businesses, people want to hear straightforward talk on the everyday and interconnected issues that concern them. 

At FFCC, we’ve been trialling approaches to such dilemmas with land use frameworks. When we started talking about land use frameworks, back in 2018, our intention was to reveal and curate all the issues that rely on land use decisions, to learn from what works, in the UK and internationally, and to explore approaches that help manage the conflicts that inevitably arise in complex and contested policy choices. 

Working with communities and partners from different organisations, in Devon and in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, we’ve had the opportunity to lean into some of the intractable challenges that are now making the headlines.

From the start, it’s been very clear that ‘top-down’ land use strategies won’t work. It is impossible, indeed dangerous, for Whitehall to think it can draw a map and tell people what do with land across England, however elegant the cartography.  What government can do, instead, is to set the principles for land use decisions in a framework that can be applied to different challenges, at different scales, and in different places. The Geospatial Commission has already done a lot of work to flag the importance of inter-operable and accessible data, identifying the gaps, the barriers (often cost and copyright) and the opportunities to make good spatial information more readily available to assist in decision making. 

Working with them, we learned a lot about the real-life application of diverse geospatial data sets. Through the development of a prototype decision support tool, with partners Vizzuality, the Cambridgeshire group got a glimpse of what’s revealed when you overlay different datasets. They helped the group model where housing affected nature-sensitive areas; where infrastructure took out Grade 1 agricultural land; where horticulture relied on fragile peatlands; and where flooding would change the entire landscape, if sea levels rose, as some scenarios predicted.  

But models can only ever be partial and provisional. Just as “the map is not the territory”, a model, while helpful in organising our thoughts in a particular way, can fall short on impact with reality. For example, when I hear talk about ‘compartments’ in land use I worry. Real world land use is not contained in compartments. Living systems rely on ‘requisite variety’ and multifunctionality for resilience and adaptability. Monocultures are fragile and barren. And we know that if you model all government commitments that relate to land in discrete spatial categories, we need more land twice the size of Wales to meet them all.

That said, some land is more suitable and more important for some functions than others. This is why we talk about the importance of being ‘land led’ alongside multifunctionality – balancing the benefits of doing more than one thing with land, whilst at the same time accounting for what land is most suitable and most needed for. Most land managers understand this, and it is often perverse policy or market incentives that drive decisions that seem at odds with what’s right for that ecosystem. Growing maize on steep slopes; grubbing up hedges for more yield; building homes on a flood plain or far from the facilities that the community needs.

Academics and policy wonks love a specialism. Specialising deepens knowledge – but it can lead to siloed thinking and risks falling for the silver-tongued seduction of a single metric. In fairness, it can be difficult if you’ve honed your expertise over many years to hear alternative arguments. The antidotes to this are transparency and inclusion, most importantly of citizens’ and land managers’ systemic and grounded perspectives.

Through our long-term trials we have seen how keen people are to engage in and work through the complex and messy problems. We’ve seen landowners working with environment managers to adapt to and mitigate flood risks; water companies working with farmers to minimise use of chemicals that could otherwise get into the water supply; communities working with planners to design places with attractive, affordable, sustainable homes where people want to live and work. And now, on Dartmoor, the new Land Use Management Group is using a framework to help reconcile the concerns of the different stakeholders on the national park, the people who live there, who work there and who visit there.

A well-designed framework will help government mediate conflicts, optimise decisions, and deliver its different priorities. We are now looking forward with great interest to see how this government grasps the nettle of land use decision making.