Farming livelihoods and landscapes: Tensions in rural development and environmental regulation

European rural development scholars have been preoccupied with how to understand the pace and scope of rural landscape change, as increasingly liberalized market economic policies and stringent environmental mandates shape contemporary landscapes and livelihoods. Recent efforts to document and theorize the new practices occurring in rural landscapes have produced two competing explanatory frameworks of rural change, one of which asserts a paradigm shift in rural development based around new agri-food networks and the expansion of non-agriculturally related activities in the landscape, while the other argues there is more continuity than change in current practices. The paper presents a case study of livestock farming in Devon, southwest England, a region where agriculture is central to the iconography of the area and yet is under threat by environmental and economic challenges. Based on in-depth interviews and extensive surveys with nearly 80 farmers in a catchment in Devon, we find that most of the changes farmers are making in response to these challenges are agri-centric 'coping strategies' embedded within a productivist framework, rather than constituting a new paradigm of rural development. © 2010 Landscape Research Group Ltd.