WP2: Social Capacities for Peatland Transformations

WP2: Social Capacities for Peatland Transformations

Objective: To establish the social capacity of key land stakeholders to undertake peatland restoration in the case study regions and the conditions necessary for this.

Co-leads: Deborah Dixon and Katherine Simpson

Contributors: Nick Hanley, Amy Proctor, Jill Robbie, Nicki Whitehouse, Mary Nthambi, Alessandro Skarlatos-Currie and Adeline Shaw

Approach: Work package 2 will establish the monetary and non-monetary motivations of landholders (landowners, land managers, farmers and crofters) to engage in peatland restoration. 

These motivations and related decisions have the potential to affect local communities and wider society. This work package will therefore also investigate the preferences of broader land interest groups (e.g., agricultural labourers, adjacent residential owners and tenants, community councils, environmental organisations, recreational land users) and how they value potential synergies and trade-offs of peatland restoration, such as recreational access, protection of the historic environment, food production and biodiversity, and what broader community benefits are desired or expected.

The team will undertake two parallel discrete choice experiments: with landholders to  explore drivers of willingness to engage in peatland restoration; and with broader land interest groups, to explore what community benefits are expected or desired from peatland restoration, and how monetary and non-monetary benefits are valued.

The discrete choice experiments will be embedded in broader qualitative approaches involving walking interviews with landholders and community representatives, and two future scenario mapping workshops (one per region). These will employ methods to assess peatland restoration pathways that are ‘bearable’, ‘viable’ and ‘equitable’, including: ranking of potential solutions; gamification/scenario planning of solutions; and role-playing activities.

The workshops will identify realistic and mutually acceptable (for landholders and broader land interest groups) pathways for peatland restoration. These pathways will be fed into the Peatland Triage Tool and discussed in the adaptive governance workshops in work package 4. Work package 2 will also create a land stakeholder engagement

framework based on the methods employed in the case study regions to allow replication to other regions.

Key outputs for this work package will include:

• A list of monetary and non-monetary motivations for landholders to undertake peatland restoration.
• A list of expected/desired monetary and non-monetary benefits from peatland restoration for broader land interest groups.
• A ranking of peatland restoration pathways that are ‘bearable’, ‘viable’ and ‘equitable’ for all key land stakeholders.
• A land interest engagement framework to allow replication of engagement in other regions.