Understanding and Acting in Loweswater, 2007-2010

<P>Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.</P><br><p>This qualitative data collection is part of the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme.<br>
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This project adopted an interdisciplinary approach to the ecological, social and economic interactions at Loweswater in the English Lake District with the aim to gain a better understanding of the environmental problem of potentially toxic algal blooms formed by cyanobacteria, (blue-green algae) in Loweswater Lake. Following findings from an earlier scoping study the project achieved to: link aquatic and terrestrial ecological knowledge; to understand how economic issues for those living and working in the catchment affect resource use and management (including waste disposal), and hence Loweswater's aquatic and terrestrial ecology; to understand how institutional arrangements pertaining to agriculture, water resources, environmental protection, economic regeneration, local government, tourism and recreation shape opportunities and constraints for catchment management; to understand the role of local culture, local knowledge and understanding in shaping land and resource use and management in the catchment and to move away from a command and control regulatory style and innovate with a new bottom-up approach to addressing the catchment's problems and opportunities. <br>
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Central to the project was the creation of a participatory, local- and stakeholder-relevant framework within which problems could be framed and re-framed, methodologies debated, and results and findings critically scrutinized by all participants. This took the form of a new experimental partnership known as the Loweswater Care Project which included relevant publics and varied forms of expertise. It followed three research objectives and research clusters (methods). These were: the creation of a new institutional mechanism the Loweswater Care Project, the creation of a knowledge-base for decision making and the transferability of the approach.<br>
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Further information for this study may be found through the <a href="https://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/RES-229-25-0008/read" target="_blank">ESRC Research Catalogue webpage: Understanding and Acting Within Loweswater: A Community Approach to Catchment Management.</a><a href="http://relu.data-archive.ac.uk/explore-data/search-browse/Project/?ID=RES-229-25-0008" title="RELU Knowledge Portal: Testing a community approach to catchment management"></a></p>