Our findings
It's important to us that the Just Scapes project directly benefits the locations and local communities in the Czech Republic, France and Scotland. With this in mind, we're sharing our findings with policy and academic networks to improve policy development and promote scientific and social impacts, both nationally and internationally.
A key part of the Just Scapes process were our transdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder ‘Just Transformation Labs’. Linked to ongoing policy consultations in each of the three areas, these labs involved shared visioning exercises to help develop manifestos for just landscape transformations.
Czech Republic
Our Czech manifesto was written based on a series of collaborative workshops held in 2023 with participants based in the regions of Slovácko, Valašsko and Horňácko regions in South and East Moravia. It is titled 'Pathways to Equitable Landscape Transformation: barriers, opportunities & recommendations'.
France
Our French team co-created their manifesto together with people who live and work in the Arac Valley. 'Towards just landscape-use transformations in the face of climate change' was conceived as a call for action, and a way to give voice to rural-dwellers.
Scotland
You can read our Guidelines for Socially Just Landscape Restoration in the Scottish Highlands here. The manifesto was written-up by Adrian Martin, David Brown and Janet Fisher, in consultation with the Affric-Kintail landscape vision working group.
We've recently published all the texts written by the participants in our three creative writing workshops in Scotland, France and the Czech Republic in a trilingual anthology.
'Letter to the Land' - a trilingual anthology
The anthology is the first of its kind that we know of, anywhere in the world.
The texts in ‘Letter to the Land’ are the result of three workshops run by a different writer in each case-study site. They are also creative offerings written by ordinary people (which is to say, non-professional writers), who include farmers, local businesspeople, students, NGO workers, smallholders and agriculturalists.
All texts have been translated into all three languages, meaning that ‘Letter to the Land’ is mutually intelligible to our three research communities, fostering conversation and illuminating points of comparison and divergence between them.
‘Letter to Land’ is now being disseminated to local officials, policymakers, research bodies and institutional bodies in France, Scotland and the Czech Republic. We're also making the document freely available here, as an example of the potential of using participatory creative writing to investigate the complex realities of environmental change and injustice.
As part of Just Scapes, we're also running a large-scale survey in all three of our case studies area. The Czech survey is now complete and the French and Scottish surveys are underway.
Watch this space for the results.
We're in the process of analysing and writing up our findings from Just Scapes. There are a few papers on the way, and we'll update this space once they're published.
