Discursive Relationships Between Landscape Science, Policy and Management Practice: Concepts, Issues and Examples - Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture - page 218

had a unique role to play in ''tackling todays major land use issues and in
developing responses to the pressing problems arising as a result of human-
induced global change'' ( 1997 : 1). The tools it has deployed for this applied
programme have been drawn from both ecology and the geosciences (Weins 1992 ;
Hobbs 1997 ). Debates over methodology have been framed within the science
paradigm as a need to shift from established traditions of experimentation and
falsification of formal hypotheses (Popper 1935 , 1959 ) to investigative protocols
better suited to the understanding and explanation of complex landscape systems
(Pickett et al. 1994 ).
Landscape planning has also been largely characterised as a rational activity.
Indeed, during the mid part of the 20th century, both planning and landscape
theorists turned to science for their inspiration, and models of landscape planning
processes privileged scientific understanding, technical analysis, and expert
judgement (McHarg 1969 ; McAllister 1980 ). When the ecological science and
rational planning traditions are drawn together, they create a trans-disciplinary
research paradigm (Tress et al. 2003 ) of landscape ecological planning as an
applied science (Ndubisi 2002 ), upon which contemporary proposals for increas-
ing the relevance of landscape ecology draw directly. The process may involve a
variety of modes of investigation, from empirical description and modelling
(Opdam et al. 2002 ), and mediated and agent based modelling (Van der Belt 2004 ;
Bakker and Doorn 2009 ), to an imaginative process of normative scenario building
(Nassauer and Corry 2004 ), expressed recently as 'design in science' (Nassauer
and Opdam 2008 ). Decision making processes are typically based on an
assumption that different views can be reconciled and effectively integrated
through rational examination and weighing up of options (Fry et al. 2007 ).
Complex and frequently contested landscape dynamics are addressed by incor-
porating multiple scales of investigation (Mussachio 2009b ).
This approach presumes well defined problems and clear decision making
frameworks, in which values are a variable in the problem solving process
(Termorshuizen and Opdam 2009 ). The role of experts is to lead the process
(e.g. Steinitz et al. 2003 ). In practice, however, landscape ecologists have seldom
had the impact they seek in place based problem solving (Stevens et al. 2007 ).
A number of reasons have been suggested. These include the difficulty of re-scaling
results and moving from the general to the particular (Stevens et al. 2007 ); insuf-
ficient engagement with the social sciences (Mussachio 2009a ), and differences in
the world view and culture of scientists on the one hand, and policy makers and
managers on the other (Fischer 2009 ). Furthermore, the value frameworks of sci-
ence and scientists are themselves subject to increasing scrutiny (Latour 2004 ).
As we show below, even in rational, science based place-making processes (such as
alternative futures planning) there are discursive moments—points at which the
values of the experts involved shape the landscape outcomes by directing investi-
gations down particular pathways. In short, the engagement of science, scientists,
and scientific knowledge with planning and politics is now widely recognised as a
major focus of tension more generally (Latour 2004 ), and a priority for investi-
gation in landscape ecology in particular (Beunen and Opdam 2011 ).