There is great potential for the land sector to help meet ambitious climate change mitigation and adaptation targets. But the current picture is often one of disjointed policies and a lack of coordination between national and local levels. Scotland is pioneering a new approach to address this challenge through the development of new Regional Land Use Partnerships (RLUPs) and Frameworks (RLUFs) in order to deliver the land use decisions needed to meet the 2030 and 2045 climate targets. These new institutions have the potential to be innovative in approach, but their success will depend on addressing significant questions, for example surrounding how they relate to existing institutional structures, the powers and tools they have to influence land managers, and how they use data.
This ‘research translation’ Fellowship, funded by the UKRI Landscape Decisions Programme, involves supporting the development of RLUPs and RLUFs through demand-led research translation. I am doing this through the production of policy briefs synthesising existing research on large-scale partnership approaches, focussed workshops with those leading the development of RLUPs, and action-learning with individual RLUPs. Through close collaboration, I am aiming to help clarify how the partnerships could work in practice. Coordinated national and regional level land use planning is still relatively rare internationally. This work will give practical insights into its implementation that will provide learning for the wider UK and beyond.
To read some of the outputs so far, please see the following links:
Policy brief (8 pages): Land use partnerships for addressing climate change: What are they, why use them, and how do they work?
Discussion paper (20 pages): The form and function of land use partnerships: insights for Scotland’s Regional Land Use Partnerships
