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Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for fl ood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defi ning and communicating fl ood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, offi cial statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional confl icts over the use of the Environment Agency (EA) Flood Map to support decision making by English local planning authorities (LPAs), whose local political mandate, statutory obligations, and professionalized planning culture put them at odds with the narrower bureaucratic imperative of the Agency to restrict developments at risk of fl ooding. The paper shows how the Flood Map was designed to standardize and script the planning process and ensure that LPA decisions were aligned with EA views about avoiding development in zones at risk of fl ooding without actually banning such development outright. But technologies are also shaped by their users, and so the paper documents how planners accommodated and resisted this technology of indirect rule. Their concerns about sterilizing areas depicted as being at risk of fl ooding and about the diffi culties of actually using the Flood Map for speedy and defensible development-control decisions were crucial in its eventual replacement by a new decision-support technology, Strategic Flood Risk Assessments, which then led to the descripting of the Flood Map to infl uence a new set of users: the public. The paper closes with some wider refl ections on the signifi cance of the case for risk-based governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I interrogate the relationship between environmental science and local governance in the United Kingdom. Effectively linking science and policy is critical to sustainable planning, and within the rhetoric of evidence-based policy it is often assumed that science conducted in a locality will feed linearly into the governance of that locality. This assumption is unpacked through the detailed study of an end-user-oriented environmental research project. I argue that the reproduction of separate scientific and political spheres prevented the research from being relevant to the governance of that locality. Theoretical and practical approaches to the spatialities of the research-policy interface are considered in order to politically reconstruct the local as a meaningful field of environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing public policy interest in the management of rural landscapes for conservation, both in terms of natural and cultural heritage. Agri-environmental policies are an important pan of an emerging vision for a sustainable countryside, with increasing support for the existing Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) and Countryside Stewardship (CS) schemes. This paper provides insight into the nature of land-manager attitudes towards the conservation of rural landscapes and how these relate to differing modes and levels of engagement with these two schemes. It is based on the results of a recently completed project exploring the attitudes and practices of 100 land managers towards features of landscape and historic interest. Agri-environmental research has often sought to 'typologise' attitudes and practices around discrete land-manager types; an approach that may downgrade commonalities between land managers, the potential interplay of elements defining these types, and the possibility that land-manager identities may not be uniform. In this paper, in contrast, we emphasise the significance of these three analytical issues surrounding landmanager attitudes and practices. We explore land managers' interest and investment in conservation and go on to explain how these concerns were often closely related to the wildlife, historic and aesthetic goals of the schemes. The analysis then considers in detail how a concern for conservation often came to interplay with economic concerns to produce different attitudes and practices. We term these 'styles of participation and nonparticipation' to emphasise that such modes of uptake are not necessarily associated with specific land-manager types. Land managers developed these attitudes and practices with respect to different parts of their farms, types of landscape feature, and scheme in question. We conclude by emphasising the importance of contextualised analyses of land-manager values, knowledges, and practices... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]