Recommendations
Encouraging Greater Community Involvement in Landscape Issues
The most successful way to approach the wide diversity of peoples, who are affected by landscape issues, is to continue to develop different approaches, to target both a cross section of the community (as carried out in this study) and specific groups and to learn from current practice.
The more locally based the study area, the easier it is for local communities to engage in landscape character assessment and preparing guidelines. However, it is time consuming and requires a good level of voluntary or semi-voluntary commitment. However, we found that the local community could relate to a district level assessment, with the benefit that they could better appreciate how the area they knew well fitted into the wider landscape.
It is important that each stage of the consultation process is recorded and a summary of the responses included either within the main report or within a separate report such as this. The perceptions and values attributed to each landscape character type or area should contribute to the description as part of the cultural assessment and be linked to the issues. Communities will be encouraged if they can see that their contributions have made a difference.