This is a thesis on partnership working in Northumberland National Park, England. This protected area is one of ten national parks in the country, each with its own public sector management body, the national park authority. The national park authorities have two statutory purposes: to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage; and to promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities by the public. In pursuing these purposes the authorities have a duty to foster the economic and social well-being of local communities within the national park. Every national park authority has a statutory five-year management plan that details the strategies upon which the two purposes and duty will be delivered, and all require the resources and co- operation of various partners. Although, rural partnership working is a well-researched area, less attention has been paid to the particular challenges of partnership working in protected areas, such as national parks, which have become important models for sustainable development. This qualitative research was conducted through documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with a sample of 23 stakeholders involved in the management of Northumberland National Park. The researcher drew upon over ten years of experience as a local government employee, including seven years at Northumberland National Park Authority. The case study examined Northumberland National Park, which was found to have a convoluted history that has shaped, and is continuing to shape, the present day approach to its management. The processes behind rural partnership working were understood as a range of interlinking controllable and uncontrollable factors and it was found that even though partnership working was between organisations, there was an unwritten acceptance among actors that success was dependent upon a range personal factors. These findings are important for all IUCN Category V protected areas, which are collectively termed as living, working landscapes, reliant upon working in partnership to achieve their objectives. It was therefore recommended that the respective management bodies could benefit from fully understanding the discrete processes that underpin this form of governance. With regards to the case study area, it was found that after a decade of the Action Areas approach, Northumberland National Park Authority has an emerging level of support from local communities for the delivery of its management plans. It is argued in the thesis that it is an opportune time to reassess what Northumberland National Park and Northumberland National Park Authority would like to achieve from the Action Areas approach.

The links and overlapping areas of concern between international trade policy and environment policy are many and varied, and a number of often competing interests at stake, each of which must be accommodated. Thus far, the debate on this issue has been characterised by a distinct lack of agreement on how to proceed, due to a lack of a common analytical framework; each of the main communities in the debate have sought to impose their agendas, priorities and analyses. In light of this, the first purpose of this thesis is to determine whether or not there exists a legitimate role for international trade policy instruments in the conduct of environment policy. This enquiry takes to be indisputable that the protection and maintenance of a healthy and stable environment must be accorded a higher priority than anything else, including the international trading system, to the extent that they are otherwise irreconcilable. Therefore, Chapter 2 examines the basis on which environmental standards should be established, and the extent to which they should be harmonised. To determine whether the use of trade policy instruments to achieve the necessary environmental standards should be considered legitimate, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 present and discuss three tests. It is argued that the use of trade-related environmental policy instruments (TREPI) should be considered to be legitimate only if it meets all three of these tests. This three-part legitimacy test describes a decision-making process, and is a useful way of organising and analysing policy problems concerning the relationship between international trade policy and environment policy. Chapter 6 considers two actual disputes and a potential case to show how this legitimacy test might work. This latter case involves the analysis of significant new evidence about the commercial impact of environmental and animal welfare regulations on UK agriculture. By adopting the simple approach proposed in this thesis we seek to avoid the fundamental conflict caused by the epistemological and analytical assumptions and biases of each of the three communities: the international trade community, the environmental community, and the development community. Instead a more objective means of considering the complex of issues is proposed. The three tests are independent of any of the three communities and, in their simplicity, could be applied to a wide range of problems. Applied to the trade and environment issue, they demonstrate their objectivity by the conclusions they lead to: on some points they lend support to the interests of each of the three communities, while on others they do not. To the extent that an appropriate role for trade policy instruments in the conduct of environment policy is found, the second purpose of this enquiry is to consider whether or not, and in what ways, the current international trading system frustrates or facilitates such a use. Chapter 7 discusses, in three parts, the environmental effects of international trade liberalisation. In Chapter 8, the scope for possible amendments to the GATT system is considered by reference to the environmental provisions of the NAFTA. Finally, the use of domestic trade remedy laws as environment policy instruments is considered in Chapter 9.

This study examined socio-economic factors that drive the conversion of the rangelands into cultivation in a context of rangelands managed under conservation and development land use policies. Specifically, it compared the extent and factors of rangeland conversion to cultivation between and within land-use zones managed under conservation-biased policies and those managed under development-biased policies. The study was conducted in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA) buffer zones of the Serengeti National Park (SNP), chosen on the basis of generally comparable ecological, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, but different land-use policies. NCA pursue conservation compatible policies whereas LGCA pursue land-use policies that allow for almost all sorts of land-uses. The results show interesting variations in the level of households' involvement in cultivation and the magnitude of rangeland conversion that reflect the varied influence of conservation and development policies. NCA had more households that were cultivating (96%) compared to LGCA (87%). However, there was more land converted to farmlands in the LGCA (4.02 acres per household), as opposed to the NCA (2.36 acres per household). Conservation policies, particularly the controls over cultivation, in-migration, and management of the range resources in the NCA account for the low levels of rangeland conversion in the NCA. All the NCA sample households (100%) wanted to cultivate, and majority would increase the size of their farms if not for the controls on tools to be used. In the contrary, development-biased policies which do not regulate in-migration and land-use were encouraging rather than limiting conversion of the rangelands. In the LGCA, the only limitation was ecological conditions in some of the sites. In-migrant cultivators and the use of tractors and ploughs were allowed, and extension services for the development of cultivated crop were available. Households of different socio-economic and occupational backgrounds - pastoralists and non-pastoralists, residents and in-migrants, the poor and the rich - were all cultivating, but with a generally low acreage compared to cultivator communities outside the buffer zones. Wealthier pastoralists and the few settled pensioners however, owned and cultivated larger farms in both zones. In all these sub-groups, cultivation was contributing significantly to subsistence needs and herd-building. Despite the increasing cultivation, land cover change associated with human activities between 1975 and 2000 was very small compared to other buffer areas in the east African rangelands protected areas. This suggests that the current levels of cultivation in the study area can be maintained without much threat to the purposes for which the buffer zones are created. It was therefore concluded that the buffer zones ought to be managed under policies that regulate in-migration and land-use, foster growth in the livestock economy, and, allow small-scale cultivation among pastoralists.

Stakeholder participation is recognised as an important component of sustainable environmental decision-making. This understanding is supported by an 'idealised narrative' of benefits and predictions that describes stakeholder participation as delivering both transformative and substantive products. However, the relationship between the participatory process and products is poorly understood and has rarely been examined. As a result, the momentum behind the current rise in use of stakeholder participation methods is fuelled by a number of insufficiently tested normative statements. This thesis addresses this situation by exploring the effectiveness of stakeholder participation. The academic context to this evaluation reviews the arguments for participation in public policy found within the political science, natural resource management, and planning literatures. In particular, it draws on the theory of collaborative planning and the recent emergence of a parallel critical debate that identifies the challenges to effective stakeholder participation. Framed by this context, the empirical focus of this study is based on a particular participatory process called Stakeholder Dialogue. In order to establish a measure of effectiveness that goes beyond describing results and identifies potential explanations for the products of Stakeholder Dialogue the thesis develops an original evaluation strategy based around a retrospective case study methodology. The evaluation uncovers a complex picture of relationships which challenges the notion that alongside the successful production of a substantive product, an inclusive, transparent and deliberative process will also deliver a broad set of transformative benefits. At the heart of this complexity lies the interface between the multifaceted and pervasive influence of context, in particular its influence on the expectations and interests of stakeholders, and the notions of deliberation and inclusion that define participatory practice. Failure to address this complexity is compounded by the instrumental purpose behind environmental policy together these themes frustrate the delivery of comparable benefits to all participants.

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Environmental Innovation is seen as vital for sustainable futures. Knowledge about environmental innovation is sought in various contexts and recent thinking recognizes this as a process that unfolds in time and space. Environmental innovation journeys are therefore the subject of a growing literature. However, little is known about how environmental innovation journeys actually proceed in various contexts, how we might make sense of these and intervene to attain more sustainable futures. This thesis begins to address this gap in knowledge. It reports ethnographic research undertaken to explore an environmental innovation journey situated in a firm from the UK food and farming sector. Data were collected from multiple sources via multiple methods including participant observation and semi-structured interviews. This thesis shows that the environmental innovation journey is non-linear, involving temporary fixes and is reversible. This insight accords with recent constructivist accounts of environrnental innovation. Inspired by the work of John Law, these were drawn upon to make sense of the environmental innovation journey without compromising reality. Seen in this way, environmental innovation journeys involve developing, maintaining and deleting situated practices. This involves processes that are shaped by competing environmental discourses, which manifest in the firm as storylines and images of performances required of practices. Thus, the contribution of this thesis is to offer an approach to making sense of environmental innovation journeys, which may be used in other contexts and which can be adapted as appropriate by actors involved.

Conventional approaches to pro-environmental behaviour change rest on individualistic and reductive assumptions which posit that behaviour is the outcome of a linear and ultimately rational process of decision-making. Policy approaches have thus concentrated on providing tailored environmental information to individuals to encourage (eco)rational decisions and on removing barriers to 'correct' behaviour, and research has tended to focus on modelling the influences on individual decision-making processes through large scale questionnaire surveys.

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Ecosystem services, the benefits humans derive from nature, represents a radical departure in our perception of linked environmental and social problems and the actions we need to undertake to address those urgent challenges. Due to its increasingly widespread policy prominence, understanding and appraising its conceptual and practical benefits whilst at the same time acknowledging its potential pitfalls represents an important endeavour. Comprising seven parts and sixteen chapters, the first five parts of the thesis outline the main environmental and social challenges we face, presenting the core foundations, contemporary debates and developments in ecosystem services scholarship, whilst also underlining its increasing coalescence with sustainability discourse. In Part 6 we focus on a key application of ecosystem services with respect to its translation into incentive-based environmental management schemes, namely: payment for ecosystem service programmes and agri-environment schemes. We present a systematic global analysis of payment for ecosystem services programmes, highlighting the successes and challenges they face, whilst also providing an approach to improve their design and evaluation as a route to maximise their effectiveness. Turning our attention to a globally significant ecosystem, the thesis assesses the prospects for jointly developing seagrass Blue Carbon initiatives and payment for ecosystem service schemes, arguing that complementing these activities would produce significant climate, conservation and livelihood benefits. Switching contexts, from focusing on incentive schemes primarily in operation in developing countries to those designed to balance productivity and conservation matters in the agricultural sector of developed countries – the thesis explores the stakeholder and institutional factors affecting agri-environment scheme operation and implementation through the eyes of key operatives. Finally, in Part 7, I argue that a landscape framing and approach to ecosystem services provides an effective route to improve environmental management decision-making and policy as well as comprehensively addressing the linkages between ecosystem services and human-wellbeing.