Complex landscape challenges rarely fit neatly within disciplinary or sectoral boundaries. This opinion piece explores why landscape research networks are increasingly important, and how reciprocal engagement between research, industry and policy can help navigate uncertainty and complexity.
Across industry, policy and public life, a common pattern is becoming harder to ignore. The projects that matter most—those dealing with land, infrastructure, climate adaptation, food systems and nature recovery at scale—are also the ones most likely to struggle when approached through familiar models of expertise and delivery. They are complex, long-term and deeply embedded in place. And yet they are still too often shaped by narrow reference points, siloed thinking and the assumption that past experience, in isolation, is enough to guide future decisions.
In How Big Things Get Done, Dan Gardner and Bent Flyvbjerg make a compelling case for why this approach fails. Large projects, they argue, tend to go wrong not because of a lack of intelligence or effort, but because decision-makers rely too heavily on internal experience and optimistic narratives of uniqueness. Their remedy is the “outside view”: learning systematically from comparable projects, evidence and outcomes elsewhere, rather than trusting that “we’ve done this before” will be sufficient. It is a call to replace confidence with comparison, and instinct with evidence.
At the same time, Rebel Ideas reaches a complementary conclusion from a different direction. Matthew Syed shows that even when organisations do look outward, they often do so within narrow intellectual or professional circles. Homogeneity, he argues, is one of the greatest hidden risks in decision-making. Diverse perspectives—across disciplines, cultures and lived experience—are not a social luxury, but a practical necessity for anticipating risk, challenging assumptions and adapting to uncertainty.
Landscape as the lived interface between environment, society, economy and culture
Taken together, these ideas point towards a shift that landscape research has long been quietly advocating. Landscapes are not single-issue problems. As articulated in the European Landscape Convention, landscape is defined as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.” This definition—championed and embedded within landscape scholarship with support from the Landscape Research Group—frames landscape not as scenery or land use alone, but as the lived interface between environment, society, economy and culture.
Decisions about land use, infrastructure or restoration therefore rarely succeed or fail on technical grounds alone. They succeed or fail based on how well they account for complexity across space and time: governance structures, cultural meaning, everyday practice and environmental process acting together. This integrated understanding is increasingly reflected in new research published across journals such as Landscape Research and Landscape Review, where contemporary studies explore how these interactions shape outcomes on the ground.
The increasing relevance of the landscape perspective
This is why the landscape perspective is increasingly relevant beyond academia. Consider climate adaptation. Flood mitigation, heat resilience and wildfire management are often framed as engineering challenges, yet their outcomes depend on land ownership, long-term maintenance, community behaviour and ecological thresholds. Or consider nature recovery and restoration targets. Ambitious policies are now commonplace, but delivery depends on labour, livelihoods and governance arrangements that vary profoundly from place to place. Housing, transport and energy infrastructure raise similar issues, particularly in peri-urban landscapes where rural and urban logics collide and policy categories lag behind lived reality.
In all of these cases, the failure mode is familiar: decisions grounded in precedent rather than comparison; solutions developed within disciplinary or organisational silos; and unintended consequences that only become visible once projects are already committed. This is precisely where landscape research networks offer value—not by providing ready-made answers, but by widening the frame through which problems are understood.
Landscape researchers are trained to work comparatively, across regions and histories, and to surface patterns that are not immediately visible at project scale. They ask why similar interventions play out differently in different places, how social narratives shape acceptance or resistance, and how material flows—soil, water, labour and resources—connect distant decisions to local outcomes. In doing so, they embody both the “outside view” advocated in How Big Things Get Done and the cognitive diversity championed in Rebel Ideas.
According to Syed’s perspective, there is also a parallel risk on the academic side, particularly for early-career researchers. In an environment shaped by publication pressure, short-term contracts and digital visibility, it is increasingly easy for researchers to become siloed in their thinking—drawing peer networks from what is most visible online, most cited, or most easily discoverable, rather than from the full diversity of practice and experience shaping landscapes on the ground. Theories can become refined within relatively closed intellectual loops, while the messy realities of delivery—regulation, procurement, public response, maintenance and long-term stewardship—remain abstract or distant.
Engagement with industry and policy contexts is, for these researchers, not a dilution of academic rigour but a way of strengthening it: exposing assumptions, sharpening questions and ensuring that research is capable of functioning in real-world landscapes.
Working across research, industry and policy
For industry, engaging with landscape research is not about outsourcing thinking, nor about supporting research at arm’s length. It is about gaining access to a broader evidence base and a wider range of perspectives at a stage when choices are still flexible. It allows assumptions to be tested early, risks to be identified before they crystallise, and lessons from other contexts to be applied with greater confidence.
At the same time, this exchange must work in both directions. Landscape researchers—particularly those early in their careers—need exposure to the realities of industry and policy: regulatory constraints, procurement processes, financial pressures, stakeholder negotiation and delivery timelines. Without this grounding, research risks remaining abstract, however rigorous its methods. When researchers are invited into dialogue with practice, their work becomes sharper, more relevant and more likely to inform real-world decision-making.
This is why enduring research networks matter more than one-off consultations or transactional partnerships. Networks create continuity. They allow questions to be revisited as conditions change, evidence to accumulate over time, and trust to develop between people who do not share the same professional language but are working on the same landscapes. They create spaces where disagreement is productive, where diverse perspectives can coexist, and where learning is iterative rather than episodic.
The role of the Landscape Research Group
The Landscape Research Group exists to support exactly this kind of exchange. As an international, interdisciplinary community, LRG connects emerging research across disciplines, with lived experience from industry, policy and practice. Its contribution to the development and dissemination of the European Landscape Convention concept of landscape—outlined in work authored by Steven Shuttleworth and Peter Howard—illustrates how research networks can influence both theory and practice over the long term.
In a world where landscape-level decisions increasingly shape economic, environmental and social outcomes for decades to come, the question is no longer whether we should invest in open research networks, but how quickly we can build them well. Moving beyond “how it’s always been done” requires shared learning, comparative insight and genuine diversity of perspective. The Landscape Research Group and other research networks offer a practical way to achieve that—creating value not for one sector alone, but for everyone working within the complex, contested landscapes of today.
Continuing the conversation
The questions raised here do not lend themselves to off-the-shelf solutions. They require time, trust and sustained exchange between people who approach landscapes from different professional, disciplinary and experiential positions. For industry, policymakers and practitioners, this means engaging not simply with research outputs, but with the researchers themselves—particularly those at early and mid-career stages, whose work is actively shaping the next generation of landscape thinking. For researchers, it means looking beyond academic peer groups and publication cycles to understand how ideas operate within the constraints, pressures and opportunities of real-world decision-making.
The Landscape Research Group exists to create space for these conversations to happen constructively and independently. As an international research network, it has long provided a forum where emerging research engages with practice, and is now seeking to strengthen opportunities for research insight and lived experience to inform one another earlier and more deliberately. The aim is not to blur roles or responsibilities, but to enable meaningful exchange across research, industry and policy—so that insight, challenge and real-world experience can inform thinking on all sides.
It is also important to be clear that open, independent research networks do not sustain themselves by goodwill alone. Creating the conditions for meaningful exchange—time to convene, platforms to share learning, support for early-career researchers and continuity across projects—requires financial underpinning. As a charitable research organisation, the Landscape Research Group is therefore exploring new ways to develop commercial partnerships that support this work without compromising academic independence, research integrity or charitable purpose. The intention is not to monetise access or influence outcomes, but to develop ethical, transparent models of collaboration that recognise mutual value: enabling research networks to thrive, while giving partners proportionate and thoughtful ways to engage with emerging insight and expertise.
If you are interested in discussing how engagement with landscape researchers might support your organisation’s thinking—or how closer collaboration with industry and policy could strengthen the relevance and impact of research—I would welcome an initial conversation. These discussions are exploratory by design, focused on shared questions rather than predefined outcomes, and aimed at developing approaches that are genuinely mutually beneficial.
There is a certain irony in seeking collaborative answers to the challenge of sustaining collaborative research—but that, too, reflects the reality of working in complex systems where no single actor holds all the solutions. Please feel free to get in touch to explore ideas, priorities and possibilities for working together.
Sarah M Lawton, Landscape Research Group
Director of Communications and Membership
Email: sarah.lawton@landscaperesearch.org