During the last decades rural areas in proximity of urban centers have experienced an in-migration of new types of landowners to agricultural properties. Combined with the structural development in agriculture,
the in-migration has implied a changed social and cultural composition of landowners. Whereas these areas previously were relatively homogeneous and primarily occupied by people with strong relations to agriculture, today the majority of landowners are affluent commuters. Concurrently, farms have become larger, more dispersed spatially and farmers fewer. The development in the so called ‘peri-urban areas’ have particularly been associated with two dimensions of change; change of social relations between landowners and changes of the landscape. Together these changes represent a changed social context locally. This thesis claims that people, including landowners, are not unaffected by the social context in which they are embedded. Previous studies have, for example demonstrated that landowners are influenced by social norms of land-use and land management, particularly when these norms were shared
by their social identity group. Also studies have showed that the landscape it-self communicate norms of the appropriate and acceptable land management in particular placed. On this background the aim of this thesis is to examine the role of the social context for landowners’ land management locally in a peri-urban area. Specifically, the role of landowners’ social identities and relations is examined with respect to land management decisions. The study thus contributes to the body of research aiming to supplement structural explanations of land-use and management change with socio psychological perspectives. That is, research focusing on landowners as individuals’ behaviour in a social context. The study is based on 41 semi-structured interviews with landowners in an area in proximity of Copenhagen, Denmark.