The opportunities and challenges to co-designing policy options for tree health with policy makers, researchers and land managers

Bianca Ambrose-Oji, Julie Urquhart, Gabriel Hemery, Gillian Petrokofsky, O’Brien, Liz, Glyn D. Jones and Berglind Karlsdóttir

Land Use Policy, 2024, vol. 136, issue C

Abstract: We describe experiences between 2018 and 2021 co-designing tree health policy options linked with the UK’s evolving land use policy post EU-Exit within the Future Farming and Countryside Programme. Policy makers, researchers and more than 250 land managers took part in a series of co-design engagements in a three-phase iterative co-design process that culminated in a new Tree Health Pilot. After defining the components of co-design, we describe how relationships between policy makers, researchers and land managers were built, the methods researchers introduced into the process to build capability and support participation, and the outcomes in terms of the key opportunities and challenges for policy co-design. We conclude that it is possible to move policy design beyond user focused research and into co-design. However, this relies on adequate time and resources required to build trust and fully engage all parties in a meaningful way, including the development of tools and techniques that include experimentation, different knowledge types, and moving from research and evidence collection into design. Having policy makers with participatory mindsets in the same space as land managers was important to facilitating active learning between all of those involved in the collective. Researchers played a critical role in the co-design, balancing the views and understandings of the policy community with those of the land manager community, facilitating learning, and selecting tools and techniques to make design options explicit. We conclude that policy co-design in the land-based and environmental sector is a real opportunity at an early stage of realisation, but the effectiveness and range of positive and negative outcomes and impacts will need to be evaluated in the future.

Keywords: Co-design; Policy; Tree health; Collaborative governance; Action research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837723004404
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:136:y:2024:i:c:s0264837723004404

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2023.106974

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().