The use of landholder typologies to aid the development, implementation, and monitoring natural-resource management (NRM) policies and programs has increased considerably during the past decade. This article explores the potential for using such typologies for a variety of NRM and rural and regional development applications. Review of typology use further suggests that there is potential to refine the way that typologies are developed and applied to better aid NRM, farming systems analyses, and rural and regional development. Before typologies will be adopted more widely, a number of theoretical and methodologic issues must be addressed. These include the following questions: (1) Which criteria and methods should or can be used to classify landholders? (2) How should studies across spatial and temporal scales be integrated? (3) How should multiple and single industry studies be integrated to gain the most value from research? We argue that quantitative research techniques are well suited to provide an underlying structure for landholder typologies, and qualitative research techniques are useful for developing understanding of the nature of variation within and between landholder types. We argued further that because of the potential utility and breadth for the application of landholder typologies, a nested set of landholder typologies could be developed that are coordinated at the national, regional, and local geographic levels, with repeated measures used to track the evolution with time of landholder practices, management values, and socioeconomic characteristics.

T h i s a r t i c l e r e v i e w s t h e l i t e r a t u r e o n t h e identification of landholder typologies that can be used to assist the design and delivery of naturaldifferences lead to variation in the impacts of policies and programs across the community. The development of classification schemes to help understand the range of variation in a phenomenon and to assist in interpreting the reasons for, and effects of, the variety is characteristic of the development of any scientific discipline (Kostrowicki 1977 Kobrich et al. 2003;Emtage 2004aEmtage , 2004b. There is also considerable interest in being able to track effectively the impacts of financial assistance and economic development programs on landholders in varying circumstances and with differing life values (Johnson 2002; AAFC 2002). Anthropologists, marketing professionals and political analysts, whose task it is to track public opinions, have for a long time sought to identify homogeneous clusters or groups of people in the community.This type of approach can be applied to identify groups (or types) of landholders in relation to NRM. Developing a landholder 'typology' is one way of avoiding a blanket a p p r o a c h t o l a n d h o l d e r s , a n d a t t h e s a m e t i m e recognising that it is impossible to have policies and programs tailored to each individual. One advantage of developing a landholder typology is that it provides a multi-dimensional profile of landholders and the interrelationships between their values, attitudes, informationseeking behaviour, socio-economic characteristics and N R M p r a c t i c e s . A n i n t i m a t e u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f landholders' circumstances, values and capacities is needed for successful engagement and development programs (see, for example, Aslin and Brown 2004). Studies that have investigated landholders' capacity to adopt sustainable NRM practices have typically provided * Nick Emtage was formerly

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