Case Study Background and Setting
The Spreewald region, located southeast of Germany’s capital Berlin (see Fig. 1), is a flood plain characterised by its distinctive cultural landscape, which consists of a broad network of water channels, open marshes (including water hammering wetlands), floodplain forests and small-scale woody plant elements (water channel margins and hatches). These conditions result in high habitat and species diversity.
Increasingly, the wetlands typical of the region can no longer be cultivated and managed profitably. Due to the high moisture and small scale, many meadows require a manual mowing. In addition, many sites are only accessible by boat. As a result, more and more land is being abandoned, and there is a serious threat that it will be released from utilisation in the future. In many areas, the process of natural succession (growth of sedges and reeds, as well as reforestation) has started, and the biosphere reserve estimates that ~1500 to 2000 ha are already affected.
Hence, the traditional landscape is about to lose its typical half-open scenery, with unfavourable consequences for biodiversity conservation and landscape-aesthetic aspects, both of which are important for regional identity and tourism.
Due to the lack of financial resources for sustainable landscape management and the preservation of the open landscape, local actors from nature conservation, agriculture and tourism are looking for innovative solutions to support the maintenance of the typical historical cultural landscape. Thus, interviews and talks revealed that several collaborative innovation processes had been initiated in the years before this study was launched. These processes aimed to maintain the cultivation of the cultural landscape through actions such as the thermal use of hay, the use of donor instruments to involve tourists, and land pooling for more effective conservation measures.
The declared aim is to merge several partial solutions and local initiatives into an integrated, innovative and systemic strategy and maintenance concept for the traditional cultural landscape of the Spreewald region. This goal presupposes collective action and collaboration between key actors.
Actors and Groups of Interest
At the time of analysis, the idea of a collaborative integrated landscape management that involves local actors was still in its infancy. To support this idea, the civic foundation ‘Cultural Landscape Spreewald’ was formed in 2007. Initialised by different societal actors from the public but also from the private sector the aim of the citizen foundation is to preserve the very unique landscape in the Spreewald regions with all its typical landscape elements. Amongst the founders one can find a range of regional municipalities, private associations like the regional tourism association as well as local firms and individuals. As shown in Table 2, we identified four main actor groups which are of special relevance for the development of a CLM: the biosphere reserve management, farmers and land users, tourism providers, and local residents (including small landowners who do not use their land).
Table 2 Identified actors and groups of interest (results from the interviews) A major promoter of the civic foundation was the biosphere reserve management. The biosphere reserve has the overarching goal of harmonising biodiversity conservation and regional human activities. In addition, several local actors are affected by land use abandonment due to their different main interests. Local farmers are losing income, and landowners potentially cannot recover their running costs (taxes). Local residents stated a high commitment to and interest in preserving the typical landscape because it significantly contributes to regional identity. Furthermore, the tourism sector is one of the main beneficiaries of the region’s attractive landscape scenery, as there is strong potential for more than 1.8 million overnights per year.
Awareness of the Problem and Its Definition (from the Perspective of Different Actor Groups)
The interview analysis shows that all actors are aware of the problem of gradual change to the landscape. Different actors report that they have been observing this transformation over a period of three decades and that it began to be more pressing with the shift from the socialist planned economy to a market economy in eastern Germany. As a result of that shift, many farmers abandoned their businesses and agricultural plots started to run wild.
Despite a common awareness of a ‘crisis’, the way in which the perceived problem is defined still differs (see Table 2). From the perspective of the nature conservationists, the most important and urgent problem is the loss of areas with high nature value (especially the threat to protected species). The conservationists’ major aim is the protection of nature and biodiversity; they argue that these attributes are cross-sectorally valuable for conservation as well as for tourism conducted from a cultural history perspective. In short, nature and biodiversity together constitute a ‘unique selling point for the region’. Interviewed nature conservationists emphasise that in this case, the aim is not land use restriction, but, on the contrary, the preservation of land use.
In this regard, the conservationists’ concerns intersect with the main concern of farmers, who define the problem as a loss of agricultural land. The farmers’ aim is to maintain the agricultural sites and the opportunity to cultivate them, which is irretrievably lost, or—from an economic point of view—hardly recoverable, once the land is abandoned. The farmers consider it their responsibility to take care of their property. However, even if they emphasise their needs for economically rentable land use and for cost recovery, they also state that they do not want to become mere caretakers of the landscape without the production of food and fodder; instead they want to continue as cultivating farmers. They fear that in the future, the problematic sites might be managed by only one distant, non-regional enterprise. However, the farmers are not unanimous in their opinions: one farmer who advocates organic farming regards structural transformation in rural areas as the main problem. From his point of view, small farmers are increasingly replaced by large agriculture holdings that have no interest in soil and nature or in landscape conservation.
Representatives from the tourism sector report that the Spreewald, based on its appearance today, is perceived as the economic basis of tourism (Q1_TP, see Supplementary Data). The protection and conservation of landscape scenery is perceived as a central issue, with the landscape and the experience of nature, it provides, being crucial. Thus, tourism providers observe the transformation of the landscape with deep concern (Q2_TE).
How Do Local Actors Shape Their Relations (Interdependencies in Terms of Mutual Expectations and Perspectives)?
Interviews reveal a high potential for conflicts between nature conservation and land use interests. The management of the biosphere reserve is largely perceived as a threat responsible for land use restrictions and inadequate water management. Thus, a multitude of prejudices and a pessimistic attitude towards the biosphere reserve have been reported. For example, one interviewee (TE) illustrated his opinion by recalling the paradox that a ferry operator reported to him: some fauna species have nearly died out since the biosphere reserve was established in the region.
In an interview, one farmer also expressed great disappointment with the biosphere, which is accused of placing nature conservation above everything else (Q3_F1).
The representative of the biosphere confirms that he does indeed face this negative atmosphere. He describes situations with local actors as ‘combats’ that are characterised by strong aggressiveness and defensiveness. This is attributed to frustration resulting from radical social change after the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (Q4_F2). Discussions are also very emotional and sometimes also irrational or non-objective, and it is common to blame the BR as a ‘scapegoat’ (=’Sündenbock’) (Q5_BR, Q6_F2).
In this context, it is also documented that land use restrictions and current water management led to perceptions of paternalism. Remarkably, the theme of ‘conflict’ was prevalent throughout the interview with the biosphere reserve representative, even though that theme was not introduced in the form of a question.
Another perspective relates to the farmers. Nature conservationists and some small farmers criticise the advancing structural change, which entails a loss of small-scale farmers and an increasing concentration of land owned by only a few large agricultural companies. These changes are resulting in a lack of responsibility for the environment.
Tourism providers view farmers with indifference; their dependency on farmers’ contributions to landscape maintenance remains largely unconsidered. In this context, the role of knowledge exchange, mutual understanding and communication is emphasised (BR; TE; NC; TP). In contrast, interviews with farmers and nature conservationists consistently reveal expectations that tourism should advocate for and financially support the maintenance of the cultural landscape. However, a tourism expert notes that, contrary to what is commonly believed, tourism is often characterised by low revenue (Q7_TE).
What Are the Different Actors’ Value-based Objectives for Landscape Development?
When asked about the ‘typical Spreewald’ landscape, the interviewees find it difficult to define this concept concretely (BR, TE, P, F) because cultural landscapes are always in a state of change and are heavily influenced by anthropogenic use. However, actors had different ideas regarding the development of the cultural landscape. Interviewees attribute these differences to different actor demands, which also change over time and generations.
From a touristic perspective, the typical ‘museum landscape’ with haystacks and thatched roofs is increasingly less in-demand, while ‘wilderness’ and ‘pure nature’ are in higher demand. This change in landscape preferences on the part of tourism is concerning to the BR representative, who fears a loss and undermining of the distinctive nature of the landscape and the region (Q8_BR).
While representatives from nature conservation emphasise the maintenance and preservation of biotopes and species with high nature value, the tourism expert notes that tourism providers and nature conservationists differ in their notions of and perspectives on the cultural landscape. From the conservation point of view, the preservation of the open landscape with the typical wet meadows and the associated typical species composition is essential. In contrast, tourism providers describe a ‘narrow landscape’ consisting of river and forest as a typical Spreewald landscape (Q9_TE). Overall, the tourists and the tourism providers are primarily interested in an attractive landscape, in which details played a minor role’ (Q10_TE).
At the same time, the interviews also reflect a critical questioning of the archiving of a mere ‘museum landscape’ (represented by the artificial building of haystacks), which refers to a long-gone, fragmented style of meadow management. This perspective is also shared by some locals who do not want to be part of a ‘real life museum’.
While tourism representatives, BR representatives and conservationists have different ideas for the development or preservation of the landscape, the interview with the representative of the farmers does not reveal any specific conception of the landscape. Rather, the focus is on the management of the land and water resources as well as their consequent economic uses. This focus is also the basis for a concept of sustainability that emphasises the preservation of land use. Against this background, keeping the landscape open and preserving arable land through adequate water management are mentioned as important goals. This objective is shared by many small landowners, who prefer a ‘tidy’ landscape composed of well-cut meadows with tree-lined boundaries—an image that they remember from their childhood (Q14_LO).
Willingness and Opportunities to Cooperate
At the time of the investigation, some forms of collaborative innovation had already been initiated, aimed at preserving the typical Spreewald cultural landscape. However, these were limited to bilateral and isolated cooperations, and they had a rather random and fragmented character (thermal utilisation of biomass, tourism co-products, tree sponsorships, wet meadow shares, etc.). From the point of view of the BR, these efforts will not be sufficient to protect the specific wet meadows permanently. Therefore, an integrated development concept is advocated, which combines the different sub-solutions and strives for an inter-sectoral and strategic collaboration among tourism, agriculture, small landowners, and nature conservation. With regard to the question of opportunities for cooperation and the willingness to participate in innovation processes, the interviews reveal the following:
The actors consider direct cooperation between agriculture and tourism (as a spin-off enterprise) to be rather difficult to achieve because the agricultural structure in the Spreewald is no longer characterised by small agricultural enterprises (TE) and is increasingly dominated by large agricultural companies. These large farms, which at the same time represent a low level of actor diversity in the agricultural sector, are perceived to lack identity and solidarity with the region. From the perspective of some other actors, their pure focus on profit maximisation neglects issues of nature conservation and land conservation (F, NC).
For a while, there was some discussion of introducing a tourist tax for landscape conservation. However, it turned out that such a general levy would not be accepted by the tourism industry. Attempts to introduce a ‘Spreewald tax’ similar to a visitors’ tax have already failed in the past. Instead, as a tourism provider stressed, landowners must maintain their own land plots and bear the responsibility for doing so (Q11_TP).
There is also concern on the part of tourism providers that a general tax may result in the artificial preservation of a pure ‘museum landscape’. Tourism providers also note the ‘free rider problem’, where some pay while others only benefit (TP, FA). Furthermore, tourism providers have expressed the criticism that the BR initiated many ‘good ideas’ such as tourism co-products but did not involve tourism providers. As a result, co-products are not perceived as adequate (TP).
Trust is noted as an essential prerequisite for cooperation. However, trust is simultaneously described by the actors as being severely damaged and difficult to restore: ‘… there we come across granite in the Spreewald’(Q12_P). Above all, the BR is perceived by many actors as threatening and patronising. Here, reference is repeatedly made to the process by which the Spreewald biosphere reserve was designated in the 1990s. The region’s local residents, small landowners, and farmers are frustrated that they had no voice in this designation process. Similar frustrating experiences are recalled with regard to a major regional nature conservation project, which was carried out between 2004 and 2014 (LO).
According to some interviewees, another barrier not only to cooperation but also to the willingness to try new things is seen in the mentality of the actors, who (as a result of their socialisation in the GDR) have very little entrepreneurial spirit. New ideas and projects are often initiated by people from outside. A lack of ‘sense of community’ is noted.
Resources to Enable Collaboration
Table 2 shows that time, manpower, and facilitation skills are important required resources to coordinate and enable collaboration. Although central tasks of biosphere reserve management are to organise processes that help to preserve and develop the cultural landscape and to harmonise nature conservation with socio-economic demands, the BR management employee of the Spreewald region states that the BR does not have enough financial and human resources to establish and maintain laborious collaborative processes (BR). Moreover, the other actors do not consider BR management to be a trustworthy and legitimate moderator. Rather, the role of BR management is described as that of an outsider in the community (Q13_TE).
Interviews also revealed a two-sided problem: an ageing population and the corresponding lack of a critical mass of engaged and innovative actors with the necessary skills and capacities to collaborate. Moreover, critical actors had only very limited time to contribute; and sometimes they lacked the capacity and trust to collaborate.