Collaborative Frameworks in Land Management: A Case Study on Integrated Deer Management

Many rural economies are based directly or indirectly on the management and exploitation of natural resources, the management of which is often complicated by the great diversity of stakeholders involved. Hence, effective collaboration is a potential key driver of sustainability in rural economies.

The overall aim of this project is to produce a framework for the development of effective, informed and inclusive collaborative management to promote rural sustainability, using wild deer in Britain as a case study. Deer management provides jobs for stalkers on forestry and sporting estates and people in the meat industry. Tourists are drawn to particular landscapes which deer help to create and to see the deer themselves. However, in some areas, high deer numbers are causing overgrazing and damage to sensitive natural habitats, agricultural and forestry crops and even suburban gardens. Deer are increasingly involved in road traffic accidents. Therefore there are many different attitudes to deer and conflicts on how best to manage them.

This project will investigate how well people involved in deer management work together and how this can be improved so that the costs of managing deer are minimised and the benefits maximised. We plan to engage with those involved in deer management within the case study DMGs and have developed a programme of work that combines exciting challenges for interdisciplinary research with finding practical solutions that are relevant to those involved with managing natural resources such as deer.

The project has been developed through extensive consultation with organisations and groups involved in deer and their management. It represents the first attempt to address specifically the role of collaborative frameworks in enhancing deer management on such a large scale, and brings together an interdisciplinary team of environmental, economic and social scientists from three universities and three research institutes. The approach will be to focus on six case studies; three in Scotland and three in England.

We aim to undertake a number of activities in collaboration with stakeholders within our case study sites. These include interviews to establish who is involved and their aims and objectives for deer management; stakeholder workshops, utilising novel techniques, to facilitate consensus building, identify barriers to collaboration, gaps in knowledge and the links between deer and other environmental, social and economic issues.

Towards the end of the research, we will be developing a shared knowledge resource that will be accessible to all, by synthesising existing data/reports from case studies, knowledge from expert practitioners and scientific knowledge.