Making Landscapes of (Be)Longing. Territorialization in the Context of the Eu Development Program Leader in North Rhine-Westphalia

The participation of residents in development processes is a keystone in current rural governance arrangements. The European Union’s rural development program LEADER is an example of this, as it requests local residents to take action in the development process. Similarly, participatory forms of natural and cultural heritage preservation have increased significantly with the aim of revitalizing the socioecological fabric of territories. Following the Anthropology of Policy, the study employs an ethnographic approach to analyze the effects of bio-cultural heritage preservation strategies in the context of LEADER. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered during several field observations and semi-structured interviews in a LEADER region in North Rhine-Westphalia, the article investigates how a local LEADER initiative reconstructs a historical cultural landscape in order to valorize and exploit the biocultural heritage resources of their village. Residents articulate four interrelated senses of (be)longing while (re)making the biocultural heritage: 1) Political claim to use a resource; 2) place attachment; 3) politics of in/exclusion; and 4) nostalgic-utopian longing. As new knowledge actors in landscape governance, residents posit their perceptions, interpretations and valuations of the landscape vis-à-vis institutional actors of landscape governance and negotiate large-scale landscape transformations in the region investigated.