Within Gloucestershire, the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) and the Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) at the University of Gloucestershire have developed an integrated local delivery (ILD) framework, implemented in a range of situations, that enables those with local skills and environmental land management knowledge to contribute to the management of sensitive and key environmental sites.

The first project delivered using the ILD framework was in the Parish of Uley, Gloucestershire, where the objective was to support the village and local farmers in the restoration and long-term protection of Uley Bury Hill Fort and surrounding grassland.

The ILD framework was developed in 2004 from a landscape-scale project that outlined the urgent need for a simple mechanism that valued local knowledge and connected this knowledge and all levels of strategy to delivery by providing local relevance through a simple transferable process.

The concept of ILD is that each community could be inspired and enabled to look after its piece of the global jigsaw to deliver multi-strategy objectives at a local level. The ILD approach has been so successfully used in Gloucestershire for over 10 years, to restore key environmental protected sites, that the approach is now being applied to deliver water security through integrated catchment management.

The Upper Thames Catchment Pilot is a pioneering initiative, supported by Defra, set up to develop ways to achieve these aims. The partnership is committed to identifying related actions, many of which are already in progress in the catchment, and linking them together through the steering group to deliver integrated management of land and water.

The partnership used the ILD framework to embed this collaborative working both in the development of strategic priorities and on-the-ground delivery through a shared problem-solving approach.