Woodland neglect as social practice

Norman Dandy

Environment and Planning A, 2016, vol. 48, issue 9, 1750-1766

Abstract: The ‘under-management’ of forests is a long-standing challenge for forest policy in Europe and North America. In policy and research arenas it is most frequently explained via reference to individual land-managers’ decisions made on the basis of calculations of economic cost and benefit: a manifestation of the ‘attitudes’, ‘behaviour’, ‘choice’ paradigm. This paper seeks to challenge this analytic perspective by considering ‘under-management’ through the theoretical lens of social practice theory. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from the UK, it describes a deep-rooted practice of woodland neglect that is apparent in the ways land-managers understand woodlands, interact mentally and physically with them, and in the technology associated with them. The emergence of the UK’s woodfuel sector is used as an opportunity to consider management change from the perspective of practice. The paper finishes by considering the implications of a practice of woodland neglect for theory and forest policy, noting the importance of social and technical innovation for practice change.

Keywords: Forest management; social practice; under-management; woodfuel; woodland neglect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X16651266 (text/html)

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:sae:envira:v:48:y:2016:i:9:p:1750-1766

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16651266

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().