J Clark’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

Local Biodiversity Action Plans are the preferred policy mechanism for setting and delivering local biodiversity targets in the UK. This paper reviews the kind of knowledge conservation scientists envisage being used to identify and set local targets, and explores the means of incorporating local knowledge into this process. We use a case study of a Wildlife Enhancement Scheme (WES) on the Pevensey Levels, East Sussex, to reveal the understandings that local farmers and residents have of the nature conservation goals and practices associated with the scheme. Drawing on the findings of in-depth discussion groups, we show how farmers challenge both the monopoly of knowledge conservationists profess about nature, and the enlistment of farmers on the scheme as «technicians», motivated solely by financial rewards, rather than as knowledgeable experts who also have emotional attachments and ethical values for nature. Local people use their knowledge of both local farmers, and the industry in general, to challenge the assumption that farmers can be trusted with delivering nature conservation goals. In the absence of a commitment by central government to agree widely-held environmental standards, and a more democratic process of making judgements about what local nature is worth conserving, local residents challenge existing processes designed to conserve nature that are driven by the knowledge and practices of official experts alone. The findings of the study suggest that a widening of the knowledge base on which the goals and practices of nature conservation are founded, and a more deliberative process of making decisions about what nature is important locally, will secure and strengthen public support for local biodiversity action plans.1998 Academic Press

In this paper we examine the regulation of agricultural practice to reduce the risks of water pollution in England and Wales. We present case-study material concerning water pollution from farm livestock effluents and from agricultural pesticides, and focus on the ways in which farmers and farming practices are being reconfigured under the banner of a move towards a 'more sustainable agriculture'. Pollution policies can be seen as attempts not only to 'stabilise' nature in the rural environment, but also as a process of social ordering as farmers are recast as responsible environmental managers with newly instrumentalised self-governing properties.

In this paper the emergence during the 1980s of a water pollution problem associated with intensive livestock production is examined. Farm pollution is socially constructed and is shaped by rural social change. Rural areas are experiencing social and economic restructuring with a resultant shift in emphasis from production to consumption concerns. 'New' people are living in the countryside, with ideas about how its resources should be managed that often differ from those with traditional production interests. At the same time, the debates surrounding the privatisation of the water industry opened up the issue of water pollution in the countryside to greater critical scrutiny. It is in this context that pollution from farm 'wastes' (termed here 'farm pollution') has gone from being a 'nonproblem' in the 1970s to an issue of greater public and political concern and regulatory activity since the late 1980s. Based on evidence from a study of dairy farming in Devon, it is argued in this paper that the farm pollution problem and its regulation are as much a function of social change in the countryside as of environmental change in rivers.