Bridging the national and local in landscape decision making: building effective regional partnerships that deliver on climate policy objectives

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Research Translation Fellowship supporting the development of Regional Land Use Partnerships in ScotlandThe development of Regional Land Use Partnerships (by 2021, and their associated Frameworks by 2023) is a Scottish Government commitment, given urgency by the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2019. The core purpose is to drive delivery of the land use decisions needed to meet the 2030 and 2045 climate targets. These innovative Regional Land Use Partnerships will be put in place across all regions of Scotland. They will be the primary mechanism for delivering strategic land use decision-making that also meets climate policy objectives in Scotland. They will help implement the principles of Scotland's Land Use Strategy and Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement. The current context provides an open and radical space to deliver change. Scotland, and the wider UK, have ambitious climate targets, a generational shift in expectations, a re-design of public funding models, emerging natural capital finance, community empowerment; and an opportunity to do this well. The objective of this Fellowship is to feed cutting edge landscape decisions research into the design of these institutions, by linking into the growing landscape decisions research community. It will help to strengthen the role of research and evidence in these crucial processes. The Fellow will work closely alongside the Scottish Land Commission - the main organisation tasked with advising the Scottish Parliament on the objectives of the new Partnerships and in helping the regions with their design. Key questions they are considering include how should partnership be governed? What is their strategic fit in terms of their relationships to existing policies and institutions? What will their data and information requirements be? What are the resource requirements for effective implementation and how might these link to incentives and regulation? Overlying all these questions is how these institutions can be structured to ensure more strategic land use decision making.The research translation activities will take three forms: 1) Translating research findings from work that has recently been commissioned (e.g. on international experience in regional land use planning) along with other relevant landscapes decisions research into products (e.g. policy briefs targetted at Local Authorities) that help inform the governance structures of new Partnerships. 2) Designing and implementing processes to share knowledge between Partnerships as they develop, and to feed in other relevant landscapes decisions research to address specific governance challenges (e.g. how Partnerships might be structured to access new areas of capital such as climate finance whilst accounting for trade-offs between land uses). 3) Provision of thematic technical advice based on the Fellow's core areas of technical expertise and making links through the Landscapes Decisions Programme. The Fellow will also share insights from these processes with the wider UK landscapes decisions community through participation in conferences and the production of a research translation report that captures insights from the process.