Operationalising Landscape in Participatory Rural Greening: A Participatory Action Research Approach

Recent debates in rural development suggest a growing interest in integrating landscape-based knowledge into participatory decision-making. This study contributes to this discussion by examining how landscape—understood as the interplay between human actions, natural processes, and soil systems—can be systematically incorporated into citizen participation processes aimed at greening rural areas.
Although landscape-inclusive rural development is increasingly promoted in policy and practice, there is limited methodological understanding of how it can be meaningfully embedded in participatory decision-making and how such processes can be designed. Consequently, landscape-based knowledge often remains implicit, fragmented, or subordinate within participatory initiatives. This study addresses this gap by developing empirically grounded insights into landscape-inclusive participatory approaches. It is based on case studies in rural areas of the Northern Netherlands and it offers a transferable methodological approach for embedding landscape in participatory rural planning.
The research adopts Participatory Action Research (PAR) as its core methodology, given its capacity to support empowerment through iterative, reflexive, and interactive research and design cycles. The quintuple helix framework is used as a theoretical lens, conceptualising the natural environment as an active stakeholder alongside other actors. This is operationalised through a hybrid research design that combines qualitative participatory methods with landscape-based data, expert knowledge, and proxy representations of landscape dynamics in multi-stakeholder planning settings.
Preliminary findings indicate that the explicit integration of landscape-based knowledge leads to clearer and more coherent rural greening strategies. It improves decision-making by aligning sectoral perspectives, clarifying shared problem definitions, and making trade-offs between land use, ecological processes, and local priorities explicit. Through iterative PAR cycles of co-creation, reflection, and intervention, shared landscape knowledge is used to structure dialogue and decision-making, and fostering cross-stakeholder learning. This demonstrates PAR’s value not only as a research method but also as an innovative governance approach for landscape-inclusive rural development.