Resilience And The Cultural Landscape

Description: All over the world, efforts are being made to preserve landscapes facing fundamental change as a consequence of widespread agricultural intensification, land abandonment and urbanisation. The 'cultural landscape' and 'resilience' approaches have, until now, largely been viewed as distinct methods for understanding the effects of these dynamics and the ways in which they might be adapted or managed. This book brings together these two perspectives, providing new insights into the social-ecological resilience of cultural landscapes by coming to terms with, and challenging, the concepts of 'driving forces', 'thresholds', 'adaptive cycles' and 'adaptive management'. By linking these research communities, this book develops a new perspective on landscape changes. Based on firm conceptual contributions and rich case studies from Europe, the Americas and Australia, it will appeal to anyone interested in analysing and managing change in human-shaped environments in the context of sustainability.

Contents: Preface; 1. Connecting cultural landscapes to resilience Tobias Plieninger and Claudia Bieling; Part I. Conceptualising Landscapes and Social-Ecological Systems: 2. Landscapes as integrating frameworks for human, environmental and policy processes Paul Selman; 3. From cultural landscapes to resilient social-ecological systems: transformation of a classical paradigm or a novel approach? Thomas Kirchhoff, Fridolin Brand and Deborah Hoheisel; 4. Conceptualising the human in cultural landscapes and resilience thinking Lesley Head; 5. System or arena? Conceptual concerns around the analysis of landscape dynamics Marie Stenseke, Regina Lindborg, Annika Dhalberg and Elin Slatmo; 6. Resilience thinking vs. political ecology: understanding the dynamics of small-scale, labour-intensive farming landscapes Mats Widgren; Part II. Analysing Landscape Resilience: 7. In search of resilient behaviour: using the driving forces framework to study cultural landscapes Matthias Burgi, Felix Kienast and Anna M. Hersperger; 8. Cultural landscapes as complex adaptive systems: the cases of northern Spain and northern Argentina Alejandro J. Rescia, Maria E. Perez-Corona, Paula Arribas-Urena and John W. Dover; 9. Linking path dependency and resilience for the analysis of landscape development Andreas Rohring and Ludger Gailing; 10. The sugar-cane landscape of the Caribbean islands: resilience, adaptation and transformation of the plantation social-ecological system William Found and Marta Berbes-Blazquez; 11. Offshore wind farming on Germany's North Sea coast: tracing regime shifts across scales Kira Gee and Benjamin Burkhard; Part III. Managing Landscapes for Resilience: 12. Collective efforts to manage cultural landscapes for resilience Katrin Prager; 13. Response strategy assessment: a tool for evaluating resilience for the management of social-ecological systems Magnus Tuvendal and Thomas Elmqvist; 14. Ecosystem services and social-ecological resilience in transhumance cultural landscapes: learning from the past, looking for a future Elisa Oteros-Rozas, Jose A. Gonzalez, Berta Martin-Lopez, Cesar A. Lopez and Carlos Montes; 15. The role of homegardens in strengthening social-ecological resilience: case studies from Cuba and Austria Christine Van der Stege, Brigitte Vogl-Lukasser and Christian R. Vogl; 16. Promises and pitfalls of adaptive management in resilience thinking: the lens of political ecology Betsy A. Beymer-Farris, Thomas J. Bassett and Ian Bryceson; Part IV. Perspectives for Resilient Landscapes: 17. A heterarchy of knowledges: tools for the study of landscape histories and futures Carole L. Crumley; 18. Towards a deeper understanding of the social in resilience: the contributions of cultural landscapes Ann P. Kinzig; 19. Resilience and cultural landscapes: opportunities, relevance and ways ahead Claudia Bieling and Tobias Plieninger; Index.

Author Biography: Tobias Plieninger is Head of the Ecosystem Services Research Group at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Research Fellow at the Geography Department, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. He is an environmental scientist with a commitment to inter- and transdisciplinary landscape research. He has researched and published extensively on the driving forces, processes and impacts of change in European cultural landscapes at various spatial and temporal scales. He serves on the committees of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL) and the IUCN European Sustainable Use Specialists Group. Claudia Bieling is a landscape researcher at the Institute for Landscape Management at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Focusing on the mutual relations between people and place, she investigates land use and its various meanings for small-scale landowners and society. Her work particularly addresses landscape perceptions, immaterial benefits provided by landscapes ('cultural ecosystem services') and nature and heritage preservation in the context of private land use. She has studied these topics in an array of interdisciplinary projects on different land use forms, ranging from livestock husbandry and viticulture to forestry practices, and in different European regions.