Participants

From 2004 onwards, local residents, farmers, small business owners, the NT, environmental agencies, ecologists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), and social and natural scientists from Lancaster University began to work together. This formed the basis of the project that started in 2007 during which the participants created a new “social mechanism,” named the Loweswater Care Project (LCP; Box 2). The LCP intended to experiment with alternative approaches to those conventionally adopted in the United Kingdom to deal with issues of diffuse and point pollution and, specifically, to improve existing arrangements for the management and governance of land and water in Loweswater, which seemed very fragmented and therefore ineffective at the time.

New Avenues of Thinking

The idea behind the LCP built on the insights of a workshop that suggested that it would be useful to make much more effort to share and integrate a wide range of perspectives on “the problem” [3]. This was consistent with ongoing trends towards interdisciplinary collaboration and participation across domains of expertise in other areas of environmental management. Other examples come from catchment management [4]; flooding [5]; and seafood monitoring and fisheries management [6]. But the LCP wanted to do more than simply enhance existing politics by “bringing in” different people, things, and perspectives into a preexisting situation. Rather, the aim was partly to change the nature of the way in which stakeholders engaged with the problem at hand [7]. This implied struggles about what was at stake (and for whom and what) in the controversial situation of cyanobacteria continuing to bloom at Loweswater.

Contested Knowledge

There was a sophisticated level of acknowledgement among LCP participants that there was not one single “problem” signalled by the presence of the algae. Consequently, the project sought to open up debates about how multiple issues could be framed collectively to take better account of alternative perspectives, experiences and forms of knowledge (Box 2).

Challenges for Institutions

Previously, regulatory institutions and the NT were seen by some local farmers and businesses as “the opposition” as they largely used a “regulatory stick” to try to improve ecological quality in the lake (Box 1). Through LCP discussions, participants gained a much better appreciation of the constraints and difficulties faced by different actors in the catchment. However, it was not straightforward for the institutions to find staff time to engage with the LCP and, more particularly, to identify obvious institutional approaches to address the issues raised by the LCP.

Underlying Principles

Social science researchers contributed a framework to maintain an open, critical, and questioning style of engagement within the LCP. Gaining new knowledge about the catchment was encouraged by all participants; but so was an intense questioning around any “facts” that were brought into the forum for discussion. This approach was designed to avoid some of the drawbacks of participatory frameworks that tend to focus too quickly on solutions, which gloss over the complexities of problems [8]. To this end, it was suggested in initial LCP meetings that the LCP adhere to a simple set of principles [9] such that:

• There is not a single “right” way of understanding nature;
• All knowledge and expertise needs to be debated;
• Uncertainties in knowledge need highlighting and accepting;
• New connections are valuable;
• Doubt and questioning needs to be extended to all the LCP’s representations, including scientific representations.

Applying these principles in practice was an experiment in reversing, in a particular time and place, the commonplace acceptance that problems such as phosphorus pollution can be deciphered by scientific expertise alone. It was an experiment in creating a new basis for action and management. In the terms of one contemporary analyst of science and technology, it was an experiment that prevented “science” from taking the place of “politics” [9].

LCP participants were keen to create a situation where both lay and expert practitioners could engage in the making of a more modest and provisional kind of knowledge that would support a more socially engaged way of managing water quality issues at Loweswater [5]. What this implied was a highly critical orientation to fact-making about the cyanobacteria, including facts derived from “objective scientific methods,” such as modelling. So, for example, when natural scientists Lisa Norton and Stephen Maberly presented to the LCP the results of their modelling work that attempted to connect terrestrial and aquatic mechanisms controlling phosphorus loads and lake response, much of the discussion and questioning focused around modelling itself. For example, what it can and can’t achieve, which parameters and inputs are included or left out, and what modelling results mean for on-the-ground realities. As such, science was conducted in ways that allowed for and encouraged critiques and evaluations of the ways scientific results and knowledge are acquired.

This kind of commitment to questioning often generated new lines of inquiry and collective work. For example, during 2007–2010, small projects, many undertaken by local people, were initiated and funded by the LCP. The results of these projects came back to the forum for further questioning and critique. As participants began to collect samples, to monitor different pathways of nutrient input, they began to question prior sampling techniques. As such, the LCP was bringing about a “coproduction” of knowledge and action [10].

Impacts and Outcomes on Place and Beyond

During the project, participants of the LCP, building on the better relationships between different people and organisations, sought to identify practical actions that could be taken locally to reduce nutrient loads and consequent cyanobacterial blooms. For example, the NT, in consultation with farmers, funded work to clear vegetation from the stream that drained the lake to alleviate flooding and nutrient input from adjacent fields; NE provided advice about potential funding for joint catchment agri-environment scheme approaches; farmers and local residents successfully improved their waste management following a study by a local resident on the state of all the septic tanks in the catchment, which showed they made a significant contribution to the phosphorus load to the lake; and a survey of phosphorus levels in the soil by an agronomist employed by the project allowed farmers to reduce fertiliser applications in some fields, saving money and reducing nutrient loads to the lake. At a larger scale, the LCP disseminated its approach to other community-led groups, to local Rivers Trusts and, via local interactions and a workshop for national representatives, to organisations with responsibility for managing our environment. Some of these are currently working to align participatory collectives, like the LCP, with their existing responsibilities. The LCP provided inspiration for officials at the UK’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) who were planning the subsequent launch of the Catchment-based Approach (CaBA), which now has coverage across England [11].

There were also valuable place-based impacts and benefits for Loweswater itself. For example, building on the success of the LCP, Defra funded a follow-up project designed by Loweswater residents with resources from their Catchment Restoration Fund (CRF), which has allowed the local community to institute further practical initiatives. These include methods to reduce algal populations in the lake directly using ultrasonics, several farm-based initiatives which include using shared machinery to improve the percolation of water and nutrients into compacted soil, relocating cattle outside of the catchment (for a farm with inadequate facilities), improving slurry storage facilities to reduce slurry volume, and fencing wetland areas and streams to prevent cattle incursion. Some of the monitoring initiated by the project has been continued collaboratively between local residents and the EA. Although lakes take a long time to recover from nutrient enrichment, there are encouraging signs that water transparency is improving and chlorophyll concentrations are declining. The LCP and its successor programme funded under the Catchment Restoration Programme are contributing back to this place.