Authentic livelihoods? Navigating authenticity and change in the Lake District cultural landscape

Cultural Landscape heritage designations imbue an unresolved tension between authenticity and change, which is uncatered for in UNESCO guidance and inadequately addressed in the academic literature. This leads to management dilemmas, and potential threats to the status of designations as conflicts over management play out in practice. In this paper we propose a particular interpretation of livelihood as heritage to redress this tension and to provide an operational framework for decision-making in Cultural Landscapes that directly addresses the unresolved questions inherent in Poulios' Living Heritage Approach. To do so we combine the principles of a Sustainable Rural Livelihoods Approach with the anthropology of work and value alongside the invocation of the Georgic ethic within the context of the Lake District World Heritage Site, UK. Through an ethnographic vignette approach, we explore how farmers and a major conservation landowner (The National Trust) negotiate (authentic) change in relation to the management of the farmed landscape. We argue that authentic changes should be interpreted as those which are mediated by the enactment and reproduction of local livelihood strategies, whilst conforming with vernacular value interpretations of work and betterment. We show, however, that the category of ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ is not immutable and nor are the practices and interventions that are deemed acceptable. We caution, therefore, against renditions of local communities as being resistant to change and provide examples of how endogenous pivots toward environmental practices and tourism can be incorporated into an authentic livelihood strategy.