Cultivating change: Addressing shifts in knowledge and skills required for landscape-scale nature recovery

Delivering landscape-scale nature recovery depends on the effective acquisition and development of skills across agricultural, environmental, and governance contexts. This study draws on 25 semi-structured interviews with farmers, land managers, and intermediary organisations (delivery partners, bridging organisations, extension/advisory services) across England to examine how skills are acquired and developed in practice. Informed by taskscapes literature and structured around a novel five-domain analytical framework-systems thinking, lifelong and life-wide learning, collaborative partnerships, agri-environmental entrepreneurship, and technical expertise-findings highlight the centrality of collaborative, entrepreneurial, and technical capacities. They also reveal core tensions and misalignments: between (1) policy ambition and institutional capacity; (2) fragmentation of learning pathways caught between standardisation and flexibility; and (3) entrepreneurial initiative within compliance-oriented governance structures. The research underscores the need for tailored skill frameworks spanning formal, informal, and non-formal learning pathways to support adaptive knowledge exchange and the practical delivery of landscape-scale nature recovery.