What role do metrics of value play in translating policy into action in partnership management of landscape restoration?
Accelerating decline in the quality and extent of natural habitats has led to biodiversity loss characterised as an unprecedented global crisis. The emerging explanatory paradigm is that nature has been systematically undervalued economically. The response has been a (moral) demand for environmental restoration. This call to action, driven by the hegemonic sustainability discourse, proposes interventions driven by partnerships of local and state agents, empowered to act immediately despite pervading uncertainty around appropriate restoration techniques, and unpredictable outcomes. In the context of the delegislating neoliberal state, funding is problematic, engagement in partnerships is comparatively unsuccessful, and the policy context is muddled by the inclusion of objectives of restoring individual and community well-being. This study has undertaken a novel empirical and theoretical investigation of the gap in knowledge around the extent and quality of current environmental monitoring. Study methods included an analysis of state-reported natural value, and a semi-structured survey of the Protected Landscape authorities (PLs) that have statutory responsible for conserving and enhancing the natural beauty of 26% of England’s landscapes. The PLs had never before been comprehensively surveyed on their local monitoring activity, a gap that commissioners of the survey (the regulatory body Natural England) wished to address in advance of emerging policy proposals for national landscape recovery. It would be supposed that monitoring would be essential in order to set baselines, quantify and control restorative interventions, and to measure environmental outcomes. The surprising key empirical findings indicate that little concerted monitoring is occurring, whether locally or nationally. Theoretical findings suggest that the ideology that underpins emerging policy (Natural Capital accounting) might result in a disembedding of value metrics from their in situ natural assets. Survey results indicate that proliferating policy instruments are recognised by landscape managers as untenable fantasy projects. Confronted with policy overload landscape managers deploy ironic distance, effectively ignoring emerging policy, or emotionally distancing themselves as individuals. The paucity of reliable environmental management data has led the researcher to propose the application of longitudinal, regular, repeated, transparent, and informative aspects of critical social science methodology to the measurement of a manageable subset of natural value. In this conclusion environmental monitoring is framed as a radically disruptive activity, that challenges pervasive assumptions.
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