Further thoughts about the papers obtained through Freedom of Information requests concerning Sheffield Moors Partnership: Action Planning, Terms of Reference and Vision Statement ('2025 Vision')
I’ve now spent a longer time looking at it all. Too long: there’s pain associated with it and my bones keep telling me there’s something unhealthy going on. But I'm now reaching some conclusions about this Sheffield Moors Partnership as they call themselves and about what they are up to. You have to make the effort to get inside the minds of those who, with a straight face, are motivated to put documents like this together. And taking at face value is not really an option, not after seeing the odd ways in which the process has been steered and spun.
The first conundrum is working out how intentional is the blurring and baffling around the name. How many have been struggling with a misconception that S.M.P. was much the same as the E.M.P – Eastern Moors Partnership, which was given the lease on the Eastern Moors. The assumption would be that E.M.P. and S.M.P. were blood brothers each of them created by a consortium of RSPB and National Trust. S.M.P. would be getting the lease on Burbage, Houndkirk etc.
But the Terms of Reference suggest it’s mistaken to think this is what S.M.P. is. It’s not that kind of setup at all; it’s a different creature entirely, not a lessee or tenancy/manager of the land but a kind of pact of convenience between all local conservation groups. Somewhere within it sits an understanding that NT/RSPB will get this land but the SMP talked about here is not the same as that. Confused? Perhaps we’re meant to be. E.M.P…S.M.P.? What’s going on? Are they doing something rather stupid or are they actually trying to be too clever, or both? Once organizations make claims to be transparent and then proceed to obfuscate then you suspect they have identified some advantage in confusion marketing (cf train tickets and energy contracts)
So just what is SMP and what is it trying to do?
Without a precise definition from the guilty parties themselves, the best answer I can come up with so far is this:
The SMP is a kind of Alliance of Similar Self-Serving Interests, or to put it another way, a Treaty for Mutual Support and Defence among the numerous arms of the local conservation industry. A Coalition of All the Villains.
According to their Terms of Reference they aim:
To have a clear terms of reference to deliver collective outcome, including clarity of labour, roles and remit.
As for clear, I’m lost already. Other aims:
To be made up of delivery agents (core group) and supported by key stakeholders as required.
This Core Group is made up of
Peak District National Park Authority
RSPB
National Trust
Sheffield Wildlife Trust
Sheffield City Council
Natural England
To support one another in difficult and contentious issues, offering advice and if possible a partnership view.
To resolve ‘local’ issues by working together, using similar practices and approaches, so creating the greater sum of our parts (??)
They pledge to back each other up in the face of anticipated challenges when their respective plans are shown to be increasingly untenable in coming years as people get to be more critical. The idea is to make sure there’s no difference of view. How it might work is this: no individual group or organization will be solely responsible for policy which will be ‘industry-wide’. When one organization is tested, challenged or in dispute with local people or user groups, a collective response is put in the public domain, maybe in the form of press release or letter to local newspaper goes out. This will be very reassuring for outfits like Sheffield Wildlife Trust who will be grateful for publicly expressed support. All this will be on the basis of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. It will also make it more of a problem for any public groups or other annoying local people who want to try to get answers to questions or hold organizations to account. That is crucial because it distances the faltering organization from direct accountability.
It could be compared with the BBA, the British Bankers Association whose Chief Executive, Angela Knight, gets wheeled out to defend the indefensible whenever banks are (so unfairly?) criticized.
This defensive role and the pledges to agree approaches will serve to encourage similar intervention strategies. If this agreed methodology favoured laissez faire management and trusting natural processes and regenerations then there might be some virtue in some kind of collaboration. But when the approach is along the lines that these groups favour with constant intervention to stop nature doing what it wants this will mean more landscape homogenization, promoting more management leading to less visible diversity while fraudulently claiming to deliver ‘goods’ in the form of biodiversity.
It would not do for example if one group went out on a limb and developed an alternative or radical method because that could make others pursuing the establishment approach feel insecure. So for ‘exemplar’ management quoted passim read conventional management. This will be essentially anti-competitive, one size fits all, putting a stranglehold on innovation or radical ways forward.
This leaves us where we started some time ago unable to avoid the conclusion that this whole process is a matter of administrative empire building by charities and public service departments acting similar to participants in a cartel.
To think that suspicion is unjustified you would have to explain exactly why there is so much that is calculatedly misleading about the language.
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