The Societal Construction of Landscapes in the Context of Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

A valuable concept that connects people, places, and identities is that of landscape. In human geography, a small but growing body of literature has begun to analyse social processes of climate adaptation through a ‘landscape lens’, thus shifting the focus of research to the local level and the social, place-based values shaping adaptive activities. Scherr et al. find that in recent years “the term [landscape], and the management and policy approaches underlying it, are beginning to gain prominence as the limits of sectoral approaches become more apparent in our interconnected, crowded, resource-constrained and climate-chaotic world” (ibid: 1).

GAILING (2012b), with reference to GIDDENS’ (1988) double-hermeneutics in interpretative research, distinguishes between intellectual constructions of landscape in academia and constructions within society, but outside the academic realm (cf. section 3.1). The author refers to the latter as “weitergehende gesellschaftliche Konstruktionen” (GAILING 2012b: 149), here translated into English as ‘societal constructions’. As opposed to the term ‘social’ (in the sense of the German word ‘sozial’), I deliberately use ‘societal’ with reference to different actor groups within a society (in the sense of the German word ‘gesellschaftlich’).