Collective stewardship in a Japanese peri‐urban interface: Landowners' perspectives on farmland

Résumé fourni par la source

Abstract Controlling land use at urban fringes is a challenge due to the inherent dynamics and ambiguities of the peri‐urban interface, often resulting in farmland fragmentation or loss. To better inform farmland policies and land use planning, a nuanced, contextual understanding of landowners' motivations and operations is crucial given their primary role in decision‐making for stewarding farmland under the private property regime. This study explores how farmland owners perceive and negotiate their stewardship values to productively use peri‐urban farmland in Japan, where agrarian communities have been increasingly aging and shrinking. It focuses on a suburban community in which tenancy arrangements have progressed over the last half century on the rice paddies extending along with the residential areas. Based on semi‐structured interviews with 28 individuals, it analyzed multiple values of farmland assigned and negotiated by landowners in the process of making tenancy arrangements. For analysis of landowners' stewardship values, the study draws on the theoretical framework adapting the conceptual framings of local environmental stewardship in combination with the threefold classification of values to nature, including instrumental, intrinsic, and relational values. It finds that landowners have negotiated their multiple values of farmland at the individual, family, and communal levels while adaptably implementing farmland policies to the full extent by aligning their operational levels of property rights along with their changing stewardship assets (e.g., human, physical, social, and cultural capitals). The paper explicates the roles of landowners as active social agents to find meanings of land and continuously seek for workable solutions building on the local governance at the village level. Despite plausible challenges in securing human capital for farmland stewardship, it suggests that the peri‐urban context may provide opportunities for innovating the biocultural heritage by leveraging multiple stewardship assets in a complementary manner.