Nicholas Gill’s research while affiliated with University of Wollongong and other places

The concept of ‘peopled landscapes’ is based on the notion that it is not possible, nor socially or politically desirable, to remove people from the environment in the era of the Anthropocene. As such, it is necessary to document and develop ways to coexist and flourish. This review examines emergent scholarship about peopled landscapes and biodiversity conservation by considering invasive plant management and rewilding as social processes. While invasive plant management and rewilding are often understood as separate, thinking through social scientific research and examples from Australia and the UK, we demonstrate how both forms of human action in landscapes can be more usefully understood as social relations with nature involving social change and social action. Drawing attention to agency, practices and capacity, we show how diverse forms of human and nonhuman actions are recognised, attributed or acknowledged in biodiversity conservation in peopled landscapes. In practice, centring the idea of peopled landscapes (rather than conceiving of the environment as where the impact of people is minimised) shows how invasive plant management and rewilding can be understood as related responses to environmental problems. Flourishing and coexistence in peopled landscapes require recognition of the diverse human and nonhuman agencies that shape the politics of acceptable action, and illustrate the inseparability of environmental and social justice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Landowners interested in rural lifestyles rather than primary production, are a significant group of rural landowners in many countries. Among these landowners, distinctions are made between the management practices and motivations of absentee and resident landowners. Absentee landowners are not uncommonly depicted as poor land managers and as not meeting their responsibilities. Evidence, however, on this is mixed. With a focus on invasive plant management in Australia, we compare the motivations, attitudes, and practices of absentee and resident landowners in two high amenity areas of New South Wales, Australia. We found that attitudes and practices surrounding invasive plant management were very similar between absentee and resident landowners, but that there are some key differences surrounding motivations and barriers to invasive plant management. Our data suggests that difference between absentee and residential landowners, therefore, may be overstated with respect to invasive plant management. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

From a tradition of fieldwork-based teaching in geography, we consider the intersections of fieldwork sites and their social and spatial relationships for implications for non-placement work integrated learning (NPWIL). As the skills agenda gathers pace in universities it is critical to understand forms of NPWIL and their development. As a form of NPWIL in geography and related disciplines, fieldwork generates a range of personal, professional and academic skills for students. Through a case study of site-based fieldwork for cultural heritage teaching, we examine how such teaching can expand our understanding of this form of NPWIL. In contrast to ideas of university work including WIL as characterized and bounded by temporal linearity, we argue for seeing WIL in terms of non-linear temporality and slow “innovation flow”. We link this analysis of WIL with understandings of cultural heritage and heritage sites as also non-linear and emergent in both time and space. We reflect on a detailed case study of heritage management teaching that draws on fieldtrip and a long-term relationship with a heritage site that is an historic coal mine. Over time the evolution of the field trip shows that the site itself is a key agent in this form of NPWIL. The site embodies and generates a range of changing social and spatial relationships with community, heritage managers, and other sites linked to the mine and its history. This networked perspective on fieldwork sites illustrates how supporting “slow innovation” in fieldwork based NPWIL can facilitate beneficial teaching and other outcomes.

Rural Australia has been experiencing dramatic agricultural restructuring. A major contributor to this in some areas is peri-urban and rural residential developments, and amenity/lifestyle developments, including those associated with the inflow of urban middle-class groups into rural areas. These processes are intertwined with neoliberal trends in agri-food governance, and have complex effects on farming. However, there is a lack of farm-level studies that explore how professional farmers have been interacting and co-existing with urban/suburban development while also undertaking agricultural intensification and innovation. This study aims to examine how residential and amenity/lifestyle developments have unfolded in the Illawarra region, New South Wales, and come to influence and interact with local dairy farmers who are also managing the consequences of industry restructuring particularly from 2000. Based on semi-structured interviews, this study shows that with their proximity to Sydney, Illawarra dairy farms are influenced by deregulated planning systems, large-scale residential development, amenity driven demand for rural land, and the amenity/lifestyle economy. These processes bring farmers commercial opportunities and drive farmers to form new social and economic relationships with land buyers and investors. However, it has been increasingly difficult for farmers to acquire land for farming locally. They are also subjected to the expectations and demands of new landholders, including in relation to farm externalities and animal welfare. Farmers have to transform their production systems to fit into this context. The above factors together generate a form of multifunctional rural space.

Successful management of invasive plants (IPs) requires the active participation of diverse communities across land tenures. This can be challenging because communities do not always share the views of scientists and managers. They may directly disagree, have alternative views, or be unwilling to manage IPs. Reviews of IP social science identify opportunities to better understand the role of cultural processes and everyday practices to address these challenges. To scale up and leverage the insights of existing qualitative social science IP research, we used meta‐ethnography to unlock accounts and interpretations of lay perspectives. Meta‐ethnography is a form of qualitative research synthesis increasingly used beyond its origins in health and education to produce interpretive syntheses of an area of research. In the 7 phases of meta‐ethnography, we systematically identified and synthesized 19 qualitative articles pertinent to lay experience and knowledge of IPs in diverse settings. Action and meaning regarding IPs were influenced by 6 meta‐themes in personal and social life: dissonance, priorities, difference, agency, responsibility, and future orientations. Through descriptions and examples of each meta‐theme, we demonstrated how the meta‐themes are higher level structuring concepts across the qualitative research that we analyzed and we retained grounding in the in‐depth qualitative research. We characterized the meta‐themes as leverage points and tensions by which we reframed lay people in terms of capacity for reflective IP management rather than as obstacles. The meta‐ethnography synthesis shows how leverage points and tensions emerge from everyday life and can frame alternative and meaningful starting points for both research and public engagement and deliberation regarding IP management. These insights are not a panacea, but open up new space for reflective and mutual consideration of how to effectively navigate often complex IP problems and address conservation and social and livelihood issues in dynamic social and physical environments.

The movement of largely affluent urban or suburban populations to rural areas for specific lifestyle amenities is transforming the social and ecological compositions of rural landscapes. This transformation is evident in the biophysical changes to receiving landscapes, but also the increasing fragmentation of land use goals, skills and motivations among these new amenity migrants. In the context of cross-property management, which requires landholders to cooperate and agree on management goals, the fragmentation of land uses and management values presents significant obstacles for protecting economic and natural resources. This paper focuses on invasive plants as one cross-property management issue that is complicated by amenity migration. In particular, we investigate the claim that amenity migrants’ individual or ‘property-centric’ approach to land management worsens cross-property management issues through a disinterest in cross-property management problems, or by exercising management practices that perpetuate existing management problems. Despite the seemingly unambiguous claim in the literature that property-centrism impedes cross-property management, the precise characteristics and functions of this disposition remain largely absent. Drawing on 25 participant interviews with property-centric amenity migrants on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, we address this gap by detailing the formation of property-centric management and how it manifests in the management attitudes and practices of amenity migrants. Our analysis of property-centric management identifies both the barriers and opportunities for addressing invasive plant management, and in doing so, provides recommendations for how land managers may be better equipped to respond to cross-property management problems in rural-amenity landscapes.

Since the 1980s, many parts of rural Australia have experienced persistent financial difficulties. However, there is a lack of accounts on how farmers have improved business performance while maintaining traditional farming culture. By focusing on dairy farmers in the Illawarra region in New South Wales, Australia, this study examines the evolution of family farming culture under global agricultural change. Dairy farming dominates Illawarra agriculture, and has been constantly pressured by neoliberal policy reform and adverse market conditions. This study draws on public data, semi‐structured interviews, and participant observation. In recent decades, dairy farming has shown a trend of declining farm numbers. A longstanding culture of family farming has existed in the Illawarra and continues to shape farmers' lifestyle and business. Farmer interviewees shared this culture, and continued farming partly for non‐economic reasons. However, under economic pressures farmers both compromised some elements of this traditional farming culture, and drew on the strategic value of other elements.

Conservation areas face growing visitor numbers and heightened biosecurity risks from vectors such as bushwalkers and mountain bikers. For mountain areas, such pressures, with climate change, may be increasing in vulnerability to invasive species. Strategies to manage these risks include encouraging visitors to undertake biosecurity hygiene practices such as cleaning footwear at trailhead cleaning stations. However, limited social science biosecurity hygiene research has been undertaken. We address the issue by using a survey based on a social marketing approach to assess footwear cleaning practices among walkers in Kosciuszko National Park in south-eastern Australia. We identified perceived barriers and benefits to footwear cleaning among walkers, finding a low level of cleaning but that most walkers identified addressing biosecurity risks as a benefit from cleaning. Barriers to cleaning included queues and station maintenance. We use elements from the Theory of Planned Behaviour as a heuristic to reflect on walker behaviour and responses. Outcomes suggest strategies for station installation and design, and the value of further research into visitor norms and behaviour. We reflect on the use of social marketing and what it asks of both visitors and managers.

Regenerative agriculture, an alternative form of food and fiber production, concerns itself with enhancing and restoring resilient systems supported by functional ecosystem processes and healthy, organic soils capable of producing a full suite of ecosystem services, among them soil carbon sequestration and improved soil water retention. As such, climate change mitigation and adaptation are incidental to a larger enterprise that employs a systems approach to managing landscapes and communities. The transformative potential of regenerative agriculture has seen growing attention in the popular press, but few empirical studies have explored the processes by which farmers enter into, navigate, and, importantly, sustain the required paradigm shift in their approach to managing their properties, farm businesses, and personal lives. We draw on theories and insights associated with relational thinking to analyze the experiences of farmers in Australia who have undertaken and sustained transitions from conventional to regenerative agriculture. We present a conceptual framework of “zones of friction and traction” occurring in personal, practical, and political spheres of transformation that both challenge and facilitate the transition process. Our findings illustrate the ways in which deeply held values and emotions influence and interact with mental models, worldviews, and cultural norms as a result of regular monitoring; and how behavioral change is sustained through the establishment of self-amplifying positive feedbacks involving biophilic emotions, a sense of well-being, and an ever-expanding worldview. We conclude that transitioning to regenerative agriculture involves more than a suite of ‘climate-smart’ mitigation and adaptation practices supported by technical innovation, policy, education, and outreach. Rather, it involves subjective, nonmaterial factors associated with culture, values, ethics, identity, and emotion that operate at individual, household, and community scales and interact with regional, national and global processes. Findings have implications for strategies aimed at facilitating a large-scale transition to climate-smart regenerative agriculture.

Controlling invasive species presents a public‐good dilemma. Although environmental, social, and economic benefits of control accrue to society, costs are borne by only a few individuals and organizations. For decades, policy makers have used incentives and sanctions to encourage or coerce individual actors to contribute to the public good, with limited success. Diverse, subnational efforts to collectively manage invasive plants, insects, and animals provide effective alternatives to traditional command‐and‐control approaches. Despite this work, there has been little systematic evaluation of collective efforts to determine whether there are consistent principles underpinning success. We reviewed 32 studies to identify the extent to which collective‐action theories from related agricultural and environmental fields explain collaborative invasive species management approaches; describe and differentiate emergent invasive species collective‐action efforts; and provide guidance on how to enable more collaborative approaches to invasive species management. We identified 4 types of collective action aimed at invasive species—externally led, community led, comanaged, and organizational coalitions—that provide blueprints for future invasive species management. Existing collective‐action theories could explain the importance attributed to developing shared knowledge of the social‐ecological system and the need for social capital. Yet, collection action on invasive species requires different types of monitoring, sanctions, and boundary definitions. We argue that future government policies can benefit from establishing flexible boundaries that encourage social learning and enable colocated individuals and organizations to identify common goals, pool resources, and coordinate efforts.