Workshop Report: Social-Ecological Resilience of Cultural Landscapes
INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP: SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL RESILIENCE OF CULTURAL LANDSCAPES
15-16 June 2010, Berlin, Germany
INFORMATION
BACKGROUND
The protection, management, and planning of cultural landscapes has attracted broad interest from scientists, policy makers, and the general public. As a consequence of wide-spread agricultural intensification, land abandonment, and urbanization, many cultural landscapes all over the world are facing fundamental changes. Traditional practices characterized by small spatial scales, mixed cultures, low-input practices, and multiple ecosystem services are being abandoned and replaced by standardized and simplified land uses. All over the world, efforts are being made to preserve cultural landscapes. Though some of these efforts have proven successful, large-scale land use and subsequent landscape changes seem inevitable. The effects of these dynamics and possible ways to guide them (or at least cope with them) are addressed by two relatively distinct research communities dealing with the concepts of “cultural landscapes” and “resilience”.
THE WORKSHOP
The workshop aimed at creating, respectively enhancing, theoretical insights into the social-ecological resilience of cultural landscapes through coming to terms with – and challenging – existing concepts of “driving forces”, “thresholds”, “adaptive cycles” and “adaptive management”. We expect that an improved understanding of these issues will facilitate the fostering and advancement of future research on the resilience and sustainable management of cultural landscapes. The basis of the workshop, and starting point for extensive discussion sessions, were empirical studies focusing on cultural landscapes as social-ecological systems.
Working questions
Conceptualising cultural landscapes in terms of resilience
Is the resilience concept helpful to understand cultural landscapes (e.g. to surmount the Eurocentrism of the landscape approach)?
What are the potential problems and practical applications of the resilience/social-ecological systems framework for cultural landscapes?
How do different conceptual perspectives on cultural landscapes match with each other and are there potential ways for integration?
Driving forces of landscape change at various spatial-temporal scales
Which fast and slow variables are the most important determinants of landscape change?
At what spatial and temporal scales do these drivers act?
How can the variety of different driving forces be integrated into a framework explaining landscape change?
Resilience-based perspectives on landscape change
Which possible alternate regimes and corresponding thresholds can be identified for the landscape? What are the key points for intervention to avoid undesirable alternate landscape regimes? How can phases of reorganisation and renewal be positively managed in cultural landscapes?
Social capital as source of resilience and adaptation in
landscapes
How can social capital (e.g., social networks, shared cultural beliefs, traditions etc.) enhance resilience and adaptation in landscapes?
How do conditions of rapid change enhance and/or confound a community’s capacity to adapt?
How can social institutions be strengthened to increase regional resilience of landscapes to uncertain future changes?
Adaptive management of cultural landscapes
How can cultural landscapes be managed in an adaptive way?
How can adaptive management address the shortcomings of conventional resource management?
Which general principles that foster landscape resilience can be derived from the presented approaches?
Keynote presentations
- Mauro Agnoletti, University of Florence (Italy)
- Carole Crumley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) / Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden)
- Lesley Head, University of Wollongong (Australia)
- Ann Kinzig, Arizona State University (USA)
- Mats Widgren, Stockholm University (Sweden)
Participants
CONTACT
Claudia Bieling, University of Freiburg, Germany, claudia.bieling@landespflege.uni-freiburg.de
Tobias Plieninger, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, plieninger@bbaw.de
The
workshop was sponsored by the Social-Ecological Research Programme (SÖF)
of the German Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 01UU0904A).
