Social indicators of multifunctional rural land use: The case of forestry in the UK

This paper reviews the problems surrounding the development of indicators for multi-purpose/multifunctional forestry in the United Kingdom. Because of international and national forestry policy commitments to multi-purpose forestry and the development of indicators for sustainable forest management, which include social indicators, forestry offers a useful laboratory in which to explore the practical and conceptual issues surrounding the development of indicators in relation to rural land use. In this paper, the background to the emergence of a multi-purpose forestry policy in the UK is explored. The shift towards multi-purpose/ multifunctional forestry was boosted at international level by the Rio Earth Summit, which led to a range of region-specific international institutions which have promoted sustainable forest management. The pan-European Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests subsequently agreed a criteria and indicators approach to the evaluation of sustainable forest management, which includes consideration of the social dimension. Social indicators are problematic for several reasons. First, many social scientists would challenge the positivist basis on which indicators are normally constructed, arguing instead that social values are mutable social constructions. Nevertheless, a parallel thrust of much UK forest research in recent years has been to value the non-market benefits of forestry with greater accuracy. Given the prevalence of this positivist logic in UK forest policy circles, it is unsurprising that social issues have been marginalised and relatively weakly researched. There are now strong pressures from government to all ministries to develop performance indicators. Such indicators already exist both in relation to sustainable forest management in the UK and more widely in relation to the assessment of the Forestry Commission's performance. Recent work in the UK recognises the contested and negotiated nature of indicators and points to the resultant problems that are likely to arise in the development of social indicators, for example in the farm sector. The high degree of state ownership makes social objectives more readily achievable in the state forestry sector than in other forms of private sector productive land use, where social objectives are closely interlinked with the overall livelihoods of private landowners, but also relate to the wider values of a more complex and increasingly consumption-based rural society. The pursuit of consensually agreed social indicators for the forest sector poses major challenges and wider applications to other rural land uses such as the farm sector will also be deeply problematic, both in the UK and more widely. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.