Assessing retrospective and prospective landscape change through the development of social profiles of landholders: A tool for improving land use planning and policy formulation

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Abstract

Land use planners, natural resource managers and policy-makers need to better anticipate and respond to the widespread changes and increasing pressures affecting land and seascapes. Social science and social–ecological research can play an important role in addressing these issues, as many – if not all – of the issues and solutions are human in nature. This paper explores the potential for utilising social profiles of a wide range of landholders in two rapidly changing agricultural landscapes in the Wet Tropics of Australia as a means to interpret historical land use change, and to assess the potential for future landscape change trajectories. The social profiles, developed from qualitative interview analysis, are based on key characteristics of different groups of landholders and include: (1) length of farm occupancy, (2) farm size, (3) farm ‘survival’ strategy, (4) commercial crops grown, and (5) landholder values attached to place. A set of social profiles emerged from the two locations that indicate an evolving agricultural and social landscape that is associated with changing perceptions and values—especially around the themes of rural space, land occupancy and use and management of that space. These profiles, in combination with an understanding of the changing economic and social context of the region, provide a means for improving land use planning, natural resource management and policy formulation, particularly in locations where a shift in the social profile may be occurring, creating opportunities for large-scale landscape change.

Introduction

Landscape planners have, for a long time, argued that the interests and needs of different landscape users and managers should be taken into account as professionally as the mapping of vegetation, soils, or land use in any planning process (e.g. Luz, 1993, Luz, 2000, Nohl, 1997, Bruns et al., 2000). To achieve this goal, Luz (2000) suggests the introduction of a ‘social layer’ in the superposition of thematic maps, which are generally used in planning processes, based on the collection of social and economic data from local stakeholders (e.g. Gravsholt Busck, 2002) and through local participation (Buchecker et al., 2003, Bohnet and Smith, 2007). As landholders are the key local stakeholders who actively use, manage and change landscapes, Primdahl (1999) argues that they should be included in landscape research, planning and management. He also argues that landholders should be considered as key stakeholders by planning and management authorities because it is they who are able to implement or oppose planning goals and measures derived from scientific data. However, planning and resource management remain the domain of the natural and applied sciences and, as a result, people are seldom perceived as an integral part of the cultivated landscape (e.g. Naveh, 2001, Tress and Tress, 2001). In the recent past, however, there has been recognition of the potential roles of local stakeholders as co-researchers, co-managers and policy advisors to achieve desired planning and management outcomes (e.g. Jessel and Jacobs, 2005, Plummer and FitzGibbon, 2006).

Social profiles or landholder classifications are typically being developed by rural sociologists and rural development personnel to better understand the variety of social (e.g. level of education, social networks) and economic (e.g. farm income, debt level) circumstances and value systems within a rural community, how this variation affects their land management attitudes and behaviour (e.g. uptake of a new technology), and how the differences subsequently lead to variation in the impacts of policies and programs across the community. Emtage et al. (2006) provide a review of landholder typologies developed in Australia in relation to natural resource management and suggest that landholder typologies provide a broad indication of the variations in the characteristics of landholders and are therefore important for targeted policy and program formation in natural resource management.

To support an enhanced role for social data and stakeholder participation in land use planning and policy development, this research sought to understand the causes and consequences of landscape change occurring in two contrasting agricultural landscapes—one coastal and one upland landscape in the Wet Tropics region of Far North Queensland. In particular, the usefulness of developing social profiles for a wide range of landholders in these rural landscapes was explored by addressing the following questions:

  • (1)

    How does the current social profile of the rural farming community reflect the historical patterns of social and landscape change?

  • (2)

    How do different groups within the profile respond to, and therefore change, the biophysical landscape?

  • (3)

    How does the relative composition of the groups change over time, and how is this reflected in the landscape?

Further, the results of this research were explored in terms of the application of social profiling as a tool for improved management of change within existing planning processes.

Section snippets

Background and context

Intensive agriculture created considerable wealth over the last century in the small farming communities of the Wet Tropics region. However, while the sugar industry, the main agricultural industry along the Wet Tropics coast, faces potential long-term decline because of deteriorating terms of trade, the tourism industry has been growing rapidly (McDonald and Weston, 2004) and now has higher economic value and provides more employment in the region (Productivity Commission, 2003). Since the

Case study locations

The Wet Tropics bioregion stretches over 500 km along the Queensland coast between Townsville and Cooktown and forms a strip approximately 50 km wide (Fig. 1). In 1988, the Wet Tropics bioregion was recognised for its exceptional environmental values and some 900,000 ha (48%) of the bioregion was given World Heritage status. The major vegetation type of the World Heritage Area (WHA) is rainforest. It contains the highest biological diversity in Australia and is recognised as one of the

History of the Mossman and Julatten landscapes

Before European colonisation in the 1870s, the Kuku-Yalanji Traditional Owners of the Far North of the Wet Tropics shaped the landscape through their use of fire (Hill et al., 2000). In 1873, the Palmer River Gold Rush led to extensive clearing of forests for settlement and infrastructure (Bolton, 1972). Port Douglas became the principal administrative centre of Far North Queensland at the time and the telegraph connected Port Douglas and Brisbane by 1884. The Mossman district had been opened

Shifting social profiles—from traditional farming to multifunctional values and the potential decline of landscape values

Evidence from this research suggests that the Mossman and Julatten landscapes has seen major shifts in the patterns of farming and rural land use since European settlement, with the current social profiles of the rural community reflecting the major social and economic values in the landscape (Fig. 8). The key drivers of past landscape change have included government policies, agricultural markets and innovation in farming. The traditional specialised sugarcane farmers and traditional mixed

Conclusions

This research illustrates how past and present cumulative economic and social opportunities interact with the existing social profiles of Mossman and Julatten landholders to create the current characteristics of the Mossman coastal and Julatten upland landscape. Based on this analysis, it is suggested that future land use and natural resource management planning should incorporate such detailed knowledge of the social and cultural features of landholders, in addition to the more commonly

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the landholders who participated in this research for their time, insights, and feedback they provided on the social profiles, Karl Haug for fieldwork assistance, Jana Kaeppler for map preparation, Mark Smith for scientific discussion and Peter Thorburn for tracking down the data presented in Fig. 5. Also, I would like to thank Mr. Cress for providing a historical landscape photograph of his farm (Fig. 4) and Tony Webster for providing the photographs presented in Fig. 6.

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