Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.This qualitative data collection is part of the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme. 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. 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...