In many developed economies, fragmentation of the goals and drivers for land use linked to the pursuit of commodity production and higher financial returns has fractured and weakened former longstanding interdependencies between people and nature, contributing to significant environmental damage. Satoyama, as promoted by the IPSI partnership, highlights the importance of recognising and working with longstanding cultures and knowledge of land management and people-nature interdependencies in rural communities, in order to repair such damage, to sustain biodiversity and better address the climate emergency. This study aims to identify, understand and promote options for enhanced land-use governance, ownership and stewardship of cultural landscapes, now and into the future.

Why do this research?

The deep interdependence of people and nature is often noted but rarely supported in modern economies and societies. Satoyama landscapes hold a vital repository of knowledge and skills that can help to affirm and renew this interdependence, but their future is challenged by a lack of appreciation and support from current policies, legal institutions, markets and wider societal processes, in both Japan and Europe. This research will help to reconnect people with the values and understanding coming from Satoyama examples across these territories, in order to explore improved ways to tackle our current and future ecological challenges, including biodiversity decline and the climate emergency.

What we want to do

Our current research involves a literature review to capture diverse experience in Satoyama landscapes in Europe and Japan and to better understand the challenges and opportunities for reconnections. It will also gather information and ideas from contemporary inter- and trans-disciplinary research methodologies on how best to engage research, practice and policy together in action-oriented analysis and transformation. The ideas will be shared and developed in seminars and workshop meetings, to identify a robust approach for a significant research project centred around Satoyama reconnections. The central model for the research is the ‘living lab’ technique that has come to prominence in recent participatory studies as a mechanism to promote experimentation and real-world change alongside active research and wider public engagement. It adopts a staged process of visioning, experimentation, learning lessons and promoting transferable practice centred around the animation and facilitation of place-based examples of challenge and change. The research will select a range of cases in contrasting European and Japanese locations and communities, in which to create and exploit living labs to benefit local communities and inform global understanding and policy action. We aim to generate new ideas to better enable the reconnection of Satoyama concepts and practice so as to revitalize and sustain cultural landscapes, making a positive contribution to reversing biodiversity decline and tackling the climate emergency. Our hope is that this research will help society to recognize the value of a continued and strengthened Satoyama ethic, in future land use governance and practice.