What are landscapes for? Diverging preferences and shared understandings of rural farming landscapes

Abstract Pressures to address the biodiversity loss and climate crises, and growing demands for the provision of a wide range of public goods are changing rural landscapes, challenging existing ecologies, economies and cultures. Conflicts between competing objectives complicate the development of acceptable conservation and land use strategies, often leading to tensions among approaches for shaping the landscape. These challenges are significant in arable landscapes where food production is a prominent economic activity, yet we have a limited understanding of their implications on the ways people relate to and derive value from landscapes. We used image‐based Q methodology to build an in‐depth understanding of how landscape views, preferences and values vary across stakeholders within productive lowland agricultural landscapes, using Norfolk, England as a case study where pressures to provide multiple services alongside continued and intensive food production are significant. Views aggregated around three viewpoints, all of which were present across stakeholder groups, prioritising either wild nature, farming or countryside access and engagement. While demonstrating very different preferences for nature, farming practices and social activities, all viewpoints understood landscapes as serving multiple purposes and people as having rights and responsibilities towards them. We also found people's values, knowledge and relationships to the landscape significantly influenced attitudes towards different forms of nature. This informed very different understandings of nature's value in the countryside as a space of production, conservation and recreation, and the approaches that are considered appropriate to manage nature. Policy Implications . As rural landscapes continue to adapt to meet societal demands, intentions to shape them towards specific goals need to consider the ways in which people benefit from them and how they might be challenged. The diverging priorities of the viewpoints found here have been both supported and undermined by different policies aiming to balance mounting demands from farming landscapes. Highlighting key areas of conflict and consensus, our study suggests that incorporating a deeper understanding of views and preference diversity among stakeholders and the underlying values and relational interpretations that inform them is likely to support decision‐making that better balances competing expectations in acceptable ways. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.