There is a long-standing debate in Scotland over the use of upland areas, as initiatives to restore the native Caledonian pine forest are vying with traditional moorland management for shooting. Our study set out to improve our understanding of argumentation processes with regard to these issues. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a wide range of local people, including both stakeholders with professional interests and randomly contacted members of the public. We then explored the frames that our interview partners chose in interaction with us to make sense of the interviews. While we had anticipated that they would frame our conversation as a debate between woodland restoration and hunting interests, some of them chose different framing contexts, such as animal welfare, biodiversity enhancement, or climate change. Often, these frames had a strong social element: the roles and relationships of different groups of actors were described, and our interview partners positioned themselves within these stress fields. Strikingly, those interviewees who did use the ‘woodland restoration versus hunting’ frame described themselves explicitly as being somewhere in between the different camps and as being able to understand both sides of the debate. Rather then establishing their social identity alongside those with polarised views, these interviewees – even if they had professional interests that were strongly inclined towards a particular group – constructed their identity as neutral, pragmatic or as a mediator between extremes. To conclude, we discuss the implications of our findings for both the methodology of socio-environmental research and our understanding of the social complexities underlying environmental disputes.
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