Introduction
Background to the Study
The Rural White Paper: Our Countryside: the future. A fair deal for rural England (DETR) 2000 made clear the government’s commitment to ‘empower local communities so that decisions are taken with their active participation’ (para 1.13).
In 2002, the Countryside Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage published the Landscape Character Assessment Guidance for England and Scotland and Topic Paper 3: Landscape Character Assessment: How Stakeholders Can Help. These two documents provide more detailed guidance on empowering local communities to engage in the landscape character assessment process.
In 2001, Test Valley Borough Council had commissioned a review of the earlier Test Valley Borough Landscape Assessment (1996) in order to test the methodology used against the most recent guidance and advice and to make recommendations for an up-to-date study to support the forthcoming Test Valley Borough Local Plan Review. This review identified the need to incorporate community and other stakeholder involvement in the process of classifying landscape character and shaping future aspirations.
A Rural Focus Group Study undertaken by Miller Associates Ltd for Hampshire County Council in 2002 had also found that there was a very mixed level of understanding of the pressing issues affecting the landscape. It was also apparent that the views of the local communities often did not accord with the accepted wisdom rising from conventional participation involving more informed stakeholder participants.
The Countryside Agency actively supports the development of new approaches to engaging local communities in the landscape character assessment process. Methods have varied depending on resources, both human and financial. The method of approach to this study was designed to contribute to this pool of knowledge, and find more effective means of involving local communities.
The aim of the study was therefore to obtain a better understanding of the attitudes and values of the local communities towards the landscape and to use those views to inform the new landscape character assessment for Test Valley and future landscape character assessments.