Land is an essential but limited commodity. Food production, energy production, infrastructures, housing, but also nature conservation as well as the mitigation and adaptation to climate change are just some examples for the numerous human activities and policy objectives that require land. Since many of these land uses are mutually exclusive or involve trade-offs about their services, conflicts about what land should be used in which way and by whom arise frequently.
Sectoral solutions and single activities are not suited to address complex land use conflicts. Instead, integrated policy and planning and participatory approaches in governance and management are increasingly applied, bringing together actors from diverse backgrounds and with diverging interests. Theoretic models for participatory processes are often guided by an underlying liberal democratic understanding, acknowledging the diversity and breadth of different interests and perspectives, yet also assuming that if all interests are taken together, the actors involved can develop a harmonic community free from conflicts.
In this session, we question this assumption and place actors’ interactions in conflicts at the center of discussions. We regard disagreements, struggles and conflicts over objectives and means as inevitable in land management and governance. Therefore, we aim to discuss alternative conceptual models and empirical investigations that promote constructive ways of handling conflicts. We would thus like to concentrate less on the diverse causes for conflicts, but rather focus on the conflict dynamics, the causes for different courses of conflicts, and how actors deal with conflicts. We welcome contributions that address any of the following or related questions.  
Courses of conflicts:

How do land use conflicts evolve?
How do actors in land use conflicts act and interact?
What causes different dynamics in land use conflicts?
What affects actors’ behavior in these conflicts?
What narratives underpin conflicts/ what narratives do actors use?

The notion of place, the meaning of land and identity: 

How is the notion of place linked to conflicts between different land users?
How do different meanings of land from actors in interaction affect conflict dynamics?
How do actors’ identities linked to different land uses influence (courses of) conflicts?

Conflict management:

Which conditions, governance or management approaches can foster positive, constructive ways of handling land use conflicts?
What narratives enable constructive ways of dealing with diverging land use aims?
What is good practice for just consideration processes?

Research methods:

What research methods can be used to study actor’s interaction in conflicts?
The session would be held in English. We envisage to have a session with individual presentations and discussions. 

Koch Larissa (1); Fienitz Meike (1)
(1) Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research

 
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