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about their landscape. These might include collective consideration of the history of
the landscape; the different values it represents for the people who live, work and
visit; the dynamics and motivations that are driving change; and a vision or visions
for how the landscape might support different aspirations for the future. Different
possible ways to achieve agreed goals would be explored and debated, and a
collaborative process established to implement change.
There are an increasing number of examples of this type of deliberative
approach involving landscape scientists. Duff et al. (
2009
) reflect upon a decade of
Australian experience of scientists working as facilitators with ranchers and
indigenous communities. Austen (
2011
) reports upon a North American rural
organisation which enrols science in support of cooperative and collaborative
landscape actions. In New Zealand, Allen et al. (
2011
) describe a catchment based
model of collaboration and deliberation involving land owners, communities,
artists and scientists. A common feature of these examples is the engagement of
science experts within a community based deliberative process.
This chapter explores how landscape science can engage with these notions of
deliberative planning. We suggest that landscape ecology needs to do more than
enrol social scientists in its problem solving teams. It needs to become engaged
within collaborative, imaginative, and interactive forms of social process aimed at
shaping future landscape pattern and character. In the next section we explore the
limits of instrumental rationality in planning and place making, and introduce
concepts from the 'deliberative' paradigm. We then examine decision making in
two alternative landscape futures projects in the US, highlighting the way that
different roles and interests interact discursively at different stages in place based
studies. An example from Denmark then illustrates how experts can engage in a
process of deliberation over the future of a rural community's own landscape. The
chapter concludes by arguing that for landscape ecology to achieve the relevance it
seeks, the objectivity and impartiality that is privileged within science needs to
become reframed as one of several dimensions of value that are needed for
decision making in a true landscape democracy (Arler
2008
). We suggest that the
role of scientists as experts must be expanded to include collaborators in a com-
mon and reflexive process of knowledge formation, and this raises both questions
and challenges for the way that landscape ecology is practiced and validated.
12.2 Science, Rationality and Planning
12.2.1 Landscape Science as Rational Planning
and its Limits
Modern science is widely characterised as an instrumental and solution driven
endeavour, and this is reflected in the mainstream literature of landscape ecology.
In reviewing the evolution of the discipline, Hobbs argued that landscape ecology
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