The miombo woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa contain valuable wildlife populations, support the livelihoods of millions of people and contribute vital ecosystem services across local, national and international scales. Rapid conversion of woodland to agriculture is common, but knowledge gaps exist regarding what drives this land use change, how biodiversity responds, and how these responses affect the availability and accessibility of resources to communities. Such information is needed to make appropriate land use management decisions. This thesis aims to advance understanding by addressing these gaps using a case study from the Mbeya Region of south-west Tanzania, a remote region undergoing rapid land use change. An interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach was used to collect ecological and social data from the Kipembawe Division. The thesis provides new contemporary insights on the context and nature of rapid change in this area, demonstrating that cultivation of the main cash crop tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) is the significant driver of land use change. The thesis examines the impact that land cover change has on the availability of goods, services and biodiversity, providing new data on the interdependencies between local communities and woodland resources. The availability of crucial services such as firewood and water is perceived to be decreasing due to agricultural expansion and increased demand. Tree and butterfly species richness, abundance and diversity also decrease with increasing woodland utilisation; although an intermediate disturbance effect was identified, indicating that moderate levels of disturbance can be tolerated. Finally, the thesis draws together empirical insights and related studies to outline five contemporary challenges for the sustainable management of the miombo woodland landscape. These include the lack of knowledge about where the ecological ‘tipping point’ lies in relation to utilisation of miombo woodland, a lack of alternative livelihoods and products, high immigration rates, the remoteness of the area, and weak governance. To develop and implement sustainable land use management strategies an integrated landscape approach is suggested. Due to the ecological and social challenges identified land use management would need to be adaptive and encourage participation at differing governance levels, for which an adaptive co-management approach is appropriate.

This thesis presents ethnographic research into the practice of off-grid, low-impact dwelling in West Wales. It asks how participants imagine, construct and live lives that are low impact, and explores how this brings them into conflict with local authority planners about the proper use of land. The thesis extends anthropological theories of dwelling to critique the domestic development agenda. It demonstrates ways that low-impact dwelling is qualitatively different to low-impact development. This important distinction provides an original contribution to the existing body of literature about UK low-impact development, by revealing how inequalities implicit in the notion of development shape the possibilities for alternative models of rural land use. Research was conducted within an ecovillage in West Wales for a period of 15 months between 2010 and 2011. Supplementary visits and short stays were arranged with participants in other sites, both ecovillages and independent autonomous dwellings. This immersive approach built a sound network of low-impact practitioners, who provided semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and opportunities for participant observation. A new planning rationality has consolidated around the idea of sustainable development; policies in favour of low-impact development, but which remain subject to regulation, standards and models to ensure compliance with a matrix of requirements, are one of the results. Research participants and the Welsh Assembly Government hold divergent notions of low-impact dwelling in spite of models and mechanisms which would contain them both. Low-impact dwellers reject this system, or “grid”, and in doing so construct a hoped-for future in the present, a form of everyday activism.

More cattle, less deforestation? Land use intensification in the Amazon is an unexpected phenomenon. Theories of hollow frontier, speculative behaviour and boom-bust all share the prediction that livestock production will remain largely extensive. Yet between 1996 and 2006 productivity of cattle grew by an astounding 57.5% in the average Amazon municipality. How can this unlikely outcome be explained? What consequences for deforestation and human development? I provide a new framework for the analysis of the link between intensification, deforestation and development, focusing on four key elements: (i) frontier migration, (ii) land speculation, (iii) the rebound effect hypothesis, and (iv) the boom and bust hypothesis. Does rising land productivity of cattle increase deforestation? If so, how? Based on a comparative case-study approach I assess the micro-level foundations of the proposition that intensification leads to frontier migration and deforestation. I employ an innovative procedure to collect georeferenced survey data that I then use to provide an initial test of the proposed model of land use intensification and frontier migration. I further use secondary data and spatial econometrics to look for evidence of a positive relation between cattle intensification and deforestation (‘rebound effect’). The results suggest a substantial land-sparing effect, whereby intensification in consolidated areas is associated with lower deforestation in frontier municipalities. Do booms in deforestation lead to busts in development? I use different sources of secondary data to scrutinize the theory that predicts welfare to bust as deforestation advances, and find consistent evidence against the supposition that deforestation impacts welfare in either direction. Land use intensification is the opposite of a bust in agricultural output, so the rejection of the boom-bust hypothesis is in agreement with the depiction of a rising land productivity. This does not preclude deforestation from affecting long-term welfare in the Amazon or in the rest of the world, neither does it imply that conservation should not be a policy objective. It suggests that policymakers facing explicit short term welfare targets at the local level may focus on other policy variables than deforestation.

Agricultural areas represent around 40% of the earth surface and provide a variety of products and services essential to human societies. However, with policy reforms, market liberalisation and climate change issues, continuous land use and cover change (LUCC) brings uncertainty in the quantity and quality of ecosystem services supplied for the future generations. The processes of LUCC have been explored using top-down approaches at global and regional level but more recent methods have focused on agents’ interactions at smaller scale. This approach is better suited to understanding and modelling complex socio-ecological systems, which emerge from individual actions, and therefore for developing tools which improve policy effectiveness. In recent years, there has also been increasing interest in gaining more detailed understanding of the impacts of LUCC on the range of ecosystem services associated with different landscapes and farming practices. The objectives of this thesis are: 1/ to understand and model the internal processes of LUCC at local scale, i.e. farmer behaviour, 2/ to explore heterogeneous farmer decision making and the impacts it has on LUCC and on ecosystem services and 3/ to inform policy makers for improving the effectiveness of land-related policies. This thesis presents an agent-based modelling framework which integrates psycho-social models of heterogeneous farmer decisions and an ecological model of skylark breeding population. The model is applied to the Lunan, a small Scottish arable catchment, and is empirically-grounded using social surveys, i.e. phone interviews and choice-based conjoint experiments. Based on ecological attitudes and farming goals, three main types of farmer agents were generated: profit-oriented, multifunctionalist, traditionalist. The proportion of farmer types found within the survey was used to scale-up respondent results to the agent population, spatially distributed within a GIS-based representation of the catchment. Under three socio-economic scenarios, based on the IPCC-SRES framework, the three types of farmers maximise an utility function, which is disaggregated into economic, environmental and social preferences, and apply the farm strategy (i.e. land uses, management style, agri-environmental measures) that best satisfies them. Each type of agents demonstrates different reactions to market and policy pressures though farmers seem to be constrained by lack of financial opportunities and are therefore unable to fully comply with environmental and social goals. At the landscape level, the impacts on ecosystem services, in particular the skylark local population, depend strongly on policy objectives, which can be antagonist and create trade-offs in the provision of different services, and on farmer socio-environmental values. A set of policy recommendations is offered that encompasses the heterogeneity of farmer decision-making with the aim of meeting sustainable targets. Finally, further improvements of the conceptual and methodological framework are discussed.

Since the publication of the Brundtland Report, ‘sustainable development’ has become a popular yet contested concept among governments, international organisations and the private sector. To implement sustainable development, institutions attaining different objectives interpreted the definition in the Brundtland Report in various ways. These interpretations sometimes contradict each other. Brownfield land is the legacy of industrialisation and urbanisation. Brownfield regeneration has been considered a tool to rebuild sustainable communities. Similar to the concept of sustainable development, countries define the term brownfield land or ‘brownfields’ in different ways. Therefore, utilising brownfield regeneration to pursue sustainable development became an intricate matter. This study has developed a framework to define brownfield land to improve the quality of brownfield regeneration policymaking by analysing qualitative and quantitative evidence on the use of land and sustainability. The analyses of sustainability indexes revealed that the types of strategies applied by countries to achieve sustainability depend on their progress in development and on population density. At the same time, data also showed that the population density of a country influences the ways the term ‘brownfields’ is deinfed in the regenerating policies. Therefore, population density, as an indicator of development density, is a useful differentiator of brownfield definitions in the policies that may or may not lead to the successful regeneration. Furthermore, the concept of development densities may change based on the geographic scales of concern as well as the development of technologies that allow higher development densities without compromising the quality of life. Taiwan and England are both countries with high population densities. Preserving greenfield land and enhancing social capacities in the countries are important to maintain sustainability. However, the two countries perceive brownfield land at the opposite ends of the spectrum. England sees all previously developed land as brownfield land, while Taiwan considers ‘brownfields’ to be the result of industrial pollution. The textual analysis of parliamentary debate and news reports, in addition to the statistical analyses of land use, showed that neither definition has effectively tackled the issues of preserving greenfield land or improving social equality. In countries with higher development densities, to prevent further destruction of greenfields, and to increase the social capacities, the brownfield definition should help to focus regeneration efforts on the derelict urban land that requires interventions to bring back sustainable communities.

Große unzerschnittene, verkehrsarme Räume (UZVR) sollen möglichst vor weiterer Inanspruchnahme durch Siedlung und Verkehr geschützt werden. Die in dem Bericht dargestellten Ergebnisse bilden die Grundlage für eine neue raumordnerische Zielsetzung im Landesentwicklungsplan 2013 zum Schutz der UZVR. Dazu wurden diese für das Gebiet des Freistaates Sachsen erstmals nach der in der Länderinitiative Kernindikatoren (LIKI) abgestimmten Methodik (LIKI-/UMK Kernindikator Nr. 10) ermittelt. In die Berechnung der UZVR fließen neben Informationen zum Verkehrsnetz und zu den Siedlungsflächen auch Daten zur Verkehrsbelegung der Straßen ein. Der Bericht enthält außerdem eine Analyse der Entwicklung der UZVR im Freistaat Sachsen.

Bioregionalism advocates the use of `natural' units rather than administrative units for the delivery of landscape management, planning and decision making. Over the past decade` bioregional' frameworks have been developed as a means of delivering landscape policy in an integrated manner, across the wider countryside in the United Kingdom. Important within bioregionalism is the hybrid relationship between people, place and non-human nature. This thesis acknowledges this relationship and investigates the concept of a sense of place in a UK bioregional context. Two types of bioregions were used as the basis for this study: Natural Areas and river catchments. Using evidence from document analysis, interviews and focus groups, I examined the way in which participants related to the bioregion in which they live. The evidence analysed suggests that a sense of place is more than just a concept and occurs at a range of different spatial scales. This sense of place is complex and integral to the relationship between people and non-human nature, with non-human nature being an important factor in how people relate to place. I concluded that although bioregional frameworks are a relatively recent development within the UK, participants could relate to these units and had a sense of attachment or sense of place in relation to these frameworks. A sense of place was important to the participants within this research and there is the potential to utilise this in relation to working at a wider and more integrated level with the planning, management and conservation of the UK landscape.

Studies on land use change have attracted relatively less attention from historians compared to other disciplines like human geography and anthropology. A history of land use change in Kilimanjaro is a study of how different actors interacted and shaped the whole process of land use on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro between 1920s and 2000s. It shows that land use change involved a myriad of complex interrelations that cut across a number of actors. The actors were government policies and plans, uses of a particular land, the social, economic and political construction and affiliation to a landscape. This study uses the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro to show how the Chagga have interacted with the challenges of population increase and market economy that had impact on land availability and use. It argues that while government plans were vital in determining land use, they were not enough to give directions towards particular forms and styles of land uses, it remained to be negotiated with other factors just mentioned above. Also the study shows that it is not always the case that only population pressure and economic motives influence the way people interact with their environment but a combination of population pressure, economic motives and social cultural motives. By using documentary sources, oral histories and contemporary sources such as satellite imagery reading and interpretation, this study concludes that access to land use was diverse and varied across and within similar environments in the whole period of study from 1920s to 2000s. The variation resulted from the nature of the societies themselves, their environments and how authorities tended to regulate access and use. The thesis shows near the end that adaptation and resilience to both social-cultural, economic motives and pressures of societies moving from one area to another with somehow different characteristics was entwined in the challenges of struggling to re-establish in new environments and the social-cultural connections to land and resources. It was easier for the Chagga to maintain strong cultural ties with the highland but not to transfer knowledge and skills of highland cultivation, food habit and livestock domestication to the lowland. The reasons behind this were based on the presence of some relatives, social-cultural values and properties in terms of banana fields and houses on the highlands that could not be moved to the lowlands. The question of what type of economic activities and social interactions were to be established on the lowlands was determined by the suitability of the lowland and not necessarily the skills from the highland. For instance, cultivation of perennial crops could not be possible because the lowlands received seasonal rainfall and had no access to reliable irrigation furrows like the highlands.

Spatial prioritization and systematic conservation planning methods are designed to improve land use decisions and conservation outcomes, yet remain underutilized in many biologically-rich places that need them most. This thesis applies the theory and methods developed in the discipline of spatial prioritization to conservation and land use decisions in the Central African country of Gabon. Creating a spatial information base of priority species, habitats and land uses in a region that is notoriously data-poor, I reveal that many features important for both conservation and natural resource production are highly localized; their coincidence has important implications for management. Setting conservation targets for species and habitats, I find that representation in existing protected areas is relatively low, and identify a number of near-optimal solutions that meet all targets, with minimal impact on land used for local livelihoods. I distill these solutions down to a handful of critical biodiversity sites that are top priority to protect, and make management actions explicit for the species and habitats they contain. To make the work more widely applicable, I also develop a novel method to identify where field surveys are most likely to improve decisions about protected area expansion, providing decision-makers with more options of places that could be protected to achieve conservation goals. This study contributes to the research, development and practice of conservation prioritization and spatial planning, particularly in data-poor contexts like Gabon, which still have a wealth of biodiversity, and need to carefully plan for its conservation alongside development.

Understanding and simulating the relationship between urban land-use configuration and patterns of human spatial interaction has been the subject of multi-disciplinary research. Conceptually, it is recognized that the location decisions of several urban actors including individuals, households, firms and public sector institutions, collectively determine the spatial distribution of land-use activities; the emergent land-use patterns, in turn, provide the structural conditions within which flows and interactions between locations occur daily and respond to each other over time. Over the past six decades, various theories and concepts from urban economics, social-physics, transportation studies, and the complexity sciences have underpinned empirical research and development of state-of-the-art simulation models to explore the land-use and travel nexus. Using a case study design and selecting the Kumasi Metropolis, a medium-size metropolis of nearly two-million inhabitants in Ghana, West Africa as the case study area, two main objectives, which reflect research trends and gaps in both the empirical literature and simulation model development have been addressed in this thesis. The first objective was to examine empirically, the location choice behaviour of households and individuals with respect to their residential and job locations, and the mobility patterns associated with the observed home-work location combinations within the metropolis. The second objective was to develop an integrated geospatial and agent-based model to simulate how the residential and job location choice behaviour of heterogeneous households and individuals co-emerge with mobility patterns in the metropolis. The empirical studies presented in this thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of how location-defining attributes at multiple spatial-scales interact with socio-demographic attributes of heterogeneous households and individuals to determine their residential location choice, job location choice and mobility characteristics. The development of the Metropolitan Location and Mobility Patterns Simulator (METLOMP-SIM)—an integrated geospatial and agent-based model also demonstrates how the encoded micro-scale behaviour of purposive households and individuals, interacting with each other and their environment dynamically, could reproduce macro-scale urban location patterns, property market price formation and evolution, and patterns and attributes of spatial flows and interactions anchored on the population’s residential-job location combinations.