HydroSpheres:Co-Design for Landscape Decision-Making

The role of arts and humanities research in engaging communities with the water environment has received recent attention but there has been little exploration of the potential of interdisciplinary arts and humanities research for interrogating the decision-making process itself, understanding the varied perspectives of the actors within it, and enabling the co-creation of shared visions for future landscapes and their effective management. The HydroSpheres network aims to address this by exploring with landscape decision-makers the use of interdisciplinary co-design methods to deconstruct the decision-making process itself and develop new models that enhance both decision-making processes and the ways in which we manage landscapes in the UK. We focus on a case study presented by our project partners the Sheffield Lakelands Landscape Partnership, a four-year (2019-2022) Heritage Lottery Fund programme in the Upper Don river catchment to the north-west of Sheffield, South Yorkshire. We define the Sheffield Lakelands as a marginal landscape, caught between the Peak National Park and the urban-industrial corridor of the M1 motorway. It is also a hydrological landscape, defined by its historic and contemporary roles in the storage and supply of water for the industrial and post-industrial city, and by its potential role in protecting populations downstream against flooding under future climate change.

The way in which landscapes are managed is governed by a complex web of interactions among decision-makers and stakeholders (some visible, some tacit, others entirely unexplored). A recognition of the various conflicts, antagonisms and diverse values attached to particular landscapes is central to understanding the everyday decision-making experience in the marginalised hydrological landscapes addressed by the HydroSpheres network. George Monbiot recently argued that a radical new participatory approach to socio-environmental concerns is needed, which thrives on divergent political energies of different stakeholder communities who nevertheless share a sense of belonging within a locality - or a landscape. Others have similarly argued 'for forms of participation that take 'the antagonism [...] constitutive of human societies' as their point of departure rather than the Habermasian consensus-seeking [of top-down decision-making]' (Roth et al., 2017). The HydroSpheres network takes as its starting point the possibility of a new co-design-based 'radical hydrology' that foregrounds issues of conflicted human responses to landscape among the diverse community of decision-maker-stakeholders. This is a prerequisite for understanding and transforming decision-making processes for the holistic management of landscapes in increasingly uncertain ecological, economic and political futures.

To this end, the network brings together researchers from literature, creative writing, design, performance, and geoscience, with third-sector, governmental, and corporate decision-maker-stakeholders from the Sheffield Lakeland Landscape Partnership. Participants will collectively explore their own preconceptions about landscape decision-making; envision new ways of capturing different understandings of landscape value; and boldly state new decision-making criteria and processes that celebrate diverse, perhaps conflicting ideals rather than pragmatic compromise. The network will host a series of researcher-stakeholder workshops exploring the distributed nature, changing dynamics, and legacies of decision-making in marginal hydrological landscapes. Using co-design methods (design fictions, storytelling, scenario planning, performance) the network will seek to establish a transformative agenda for the integration of the human with the quantitative in future landscape decision-making.

Who might benefit from this Research Networking project?

The direct beneficiaries of the HydroSpheres Network include organisations within Sheffield Lakelands Landscape Partnership which has been closely involved in the design of the network and which has committed to be a partner in the project. The Sheffield Lakelands Landscape Partnership is a 4-year (2019-2022) Heritage Lottery Fund programme of landscape management, conservation and community engagement projects in the 120 square kilometre region to the north-west of Sheffield. The partners and stakeholder groups involved in the SLLP cover a wide range of actors from government authorities, major utilities, third sector and NGOs to community groups, town and parish councils and individuals living in and around the region:

Yorkshire Water; Sheffield City Council (Flood Management Steering Group); Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust; Bradfield Parish Council; Natural England; the Environment Agency; Sheffield United Community Foundation; South Yorkshire Archaeology Service; Stocksbridge Town Council
The network membership will include representatives from several of these groups as well as decision-makers from the wider national network of landscape management representing other active and legacy HLF-funded landscape partnerships, for example the Churnet Valley Living Landscapes Partnership (Staffs) and the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs Partnership (see partner letter of support).

A broad range of indirect beneficiaries of this project exists, both as a result of its role within the wider UKRI SPF Landscape Decisions programme and as a result of the strongly interdisciplinary make-up of the network and its wider connections. Key beneficiaries will include: UKRI research strategy; other HLF-funded Landscape Partnerships both active and planned; policy-makers and decision-making bodies; councils involved in landscape-scale flood management and catchment-based approaches; water utilities and regulatory authorities; environmental consultancies and organisations planning the design and delivery of landscape-scale projects under future policy initiatives; local communities, landowners and land users.

How will these groups benefit from the Research Networking project?

The Pathways to Impact document details a range of direct benefits to organisations and individuals participating in or directly engaged by the network's activities and outlines SMART impact outcomes. The network aims to deliver impact for decision-makers, policy-makers and stakeholders with an interest in landscape management, in the following four ways:

Impact 1: the network findings will benefit SLLP by increasing their effectiveness in delivering their key objectives. This will in turn enhance the overall economic impact of the HLF public sector funding that underpins the work of SLLP. We will work with SLLP's existing monitoring and evaluation team to understand the enhancements that the network activities and outcomes have delivered for participating organisations.

Impact 2: the connection of SLLP to the wider HLF Landscape Partnerships Programme and its in-reach to regional and national organisations such as Natural England, will enable the findings of the network to contribute to regional and national discourse about 'integrated decision-making in distributed contexts'.

Impact 3: SLLP network participants will gain an understanding of the value of arts and humanities research for landscape decision-making, plus knowledge and experience of working with researchers to generate creative participatory methods for decision-making that moves towards a 'holistic framework for land-use decision-making'.

Impact 4: The network activities will provide professional development for decision-makers and opportunities for reflection into their own practice, that will help build an interdisciplinary cross-sector 'community capable of articulating a new framework' for landscape decision-making.