Working Group 3.1

Sustainable Hunting – A Socioeconomic Tool for Revitalising Rural Areas?

Convenors:
Jukka Bisi,  Metsähallitus
Mikael Nygård, Åbo Akademi University, mikael.nygard@abo.fi  (contact person)
Lorenz Uthardt, Åbo Akademi University

 
The overall transformation of rural areas across Europe creates an urge for new incentives, innovations and novel ways of thinking in order to preserve and revitalise rural areas. This working group focuses on the role that hunting and new forms of sustainable wildlife management can play in these processes by creating new jobs and service structures, for example in the field of so-called hunting tourism. Another dimension of interest is the changing social and cultural meaning of hunting and the interplay between these changes and modern rural life. A third dimension is the way hunting relates to agriculture, other forms of land management and the wider rural economy.
Hunting and wildlife management are part of traditional rural culture. Hunters need access to land and can assist farmers and foresters in the management of wildlife. With over seven million hunters within the European Union, hunting is also a significant factor in rural economies. Moreover, the middle-class influx into rural areas, as well as the emphasis on tourism and leisure as rural diversification strategies, is bringing new people into hunting and opening up opportunities for its commercial development. This increasing demand, however, may bring with it tensions and conflicts, between traditional and new hunting practices, between conventional and commercial norms and between divergent attitudes towards wildlife and its management. The promotion of hunting as a tool for sustainable rural regeneration may involve resolving such tensions and conflicts.

Both empirical and conceptual papers are invited that address the challenge of developing sustainable hunting as a socioeconomic value-added for rural areas and contribute to a multidisciplinary understanding of the changing social, economic and cultural functions of hunting on a general level.