Lifestyle farming: countryside consumption and transition towards new farming models - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 73

the same time, southern European areas have, in the last two or three decades, undergone
rapid modernization and become open to European markets, values and lifestyles. This
explains why, in the Portuguese case, the move away from the countryside for an urban life,
with associated extensification or land abandonment and as well as the transfer of land to
older farmers is happening at the same time as newcomers are settling and new farming
paradigms are put in place. There are complex family relations and multiple ways of
accessing land, many of them grounded in the ownership of land by family members. The
diversity of actors and motivations in the local area is high, as is the way that they interact
with each other and their land. In the Scottish case, an example of a much more urbanized
society, the types of farmers are more clearly differentiated and the separation of lifestyle
farmers from the group of professional farmers is more straightforward.
Regime
In the MLP, socio-technical regimes are defined as the locus of established practices and
rules (mainstream activities and their supporting institutions). According to Geels and
Schot (2007), the regime accommodates a broader community of social groups and their
alignment of activities, stabilizing existing trajectories in a diverse number of ways.
Regimes are oriented towards fulfilling specific social functions. In this research we
conceptualize conventional agricultural production as the primary purpose of the
mainstream agricultural regime, recognizing that the agricultural sector has multiple
functions. These functions include environmental conservation, which for these purposes is
assessed as a separate regime. As shown in Fig. 5.2, the transition to lifestyle farming can
be viewed as a case of multiple regime interaction: the real-estate regime in particular, in its
relation with housing, is interacting with the agricultural regime in novel ways. Lifestyle
farming can be located in the overlap between agriculture and real-estate regimes, as it
fulfils the traditional function of residence provision for agricultural land managers, but the
new 'lifestyle farmers' produce differently, and for different reasons. Lifestyle farming can
also be related to the leisure regime, as it represents consumption of the experience of rural
lifestyle (including, in some cases, interaction with livestock and horses); alternatively, the
leisure orientation could be considered a feature of the changing socio-technical landscape.
The move towards lifestyle farming may reflect the landscape trend of increasing
disposable income and societal shifts towards the consumption of 'experience'. It is also
related to the landscape trend of urbanization, not so much as a physical manifestation of
growing cities but as an increased influence of urban values and lifestyles in the
countryside.
The three key regimes with which the lifestyle farming niche interacts are therefore:
agriculture, real-estate and conservation (Fig. 5.2). The first two regimes have always
interacted, as farms (at least small-scale family farms) have also been living places; the
real-estate regime also embraces the network of social relations established in a local
community that share many everyday life practices and events. Currently, and as a response
to modernization of agriculture, there is involvement with a third regime: the conservation
regime, which aims to maintain the landscape and environmental assets of these areas. The
small-scale farms considered in all three cases have been until relatively recently, both
living places and production units, being production-oriented for the market or for self-
consumption. Several of the farms which have not recently changed owners are still
managed within this paradigm, while at the same time in Portugal and Bulgaria, residents