The EU societal awareness of landscape indicator: A review of its meaning,utility and performance across different scales

There is increasing recognition that agricultural landscapes meet multiple societal needs and demands beyond provision of economic and environmental goods and services. Accordingly, there have been significant calls for the inclusion of societal, amenity and cultural values in agri-environmental landscape indicators to assist policy makers in monitoring the wider impacts of land-based policies. However, capturing the amenity and cultural values that rural agrarian areas provide, by use of such indicators, presents significant challenges. The EU social awareness of landscape indicator represents a new class of generalized social indicator using a top–down methodology to capture the social dimensions of landscape without reference to the specific structural and cultural characteristics of individual landscapes. This paper reviews this indicator in the context of existing agri-environmental indicators and their differing design concepts. Using a stakeholder consultation approach in five case study regions, the potential and limitations of the indicator are evaluated, with a particular focus on its perceived meaning, utility and performance in the context of different user groups and at different geographical scales. This analysis supplements previous EU-wide assessments, through regional scale assessment of the limitations and potentialities of the indicator and the need for further data collection. The evaluation finds that the perceived meaning of the indicator does not vary with scale, but in common with all mapped indicators, the usefulness of the indicator, to different user groups, does change with scale of presentation. This indicator is viewed as most useful when presented at the scale of governance at which end users operate. The relevance of the different sub-components of the indicator are also found to vary across regions.     

Governing by models: Exploring the technopolitics of the (in)visilibities of land

Achieving food security at a global scale while protecting the environment, as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goals, will require a complex process of collaboration and the integration of analyses at multiple scales. Agricultural and land use models are increasingly being used to bridge the global/local divide, particularly as a means to envision future land access, use and management in different agricultural production systems. This special issue contributes to our understanding of global modeling, governance and land use change. Specifically, it provides insights into the question of: how do the ways of knowing and governing affect the politics of environmental protection and agriculture? The papers in this special issue bring reflexive questions of knowledge production, public policy and civic engagement into the epistemic spaces of scientific and technological development, both as a means to improve the way we model and to understand the implications of governing by models.     

Public evaluation of landscape content and change: Several examples from Europe

This paper considers rural land use by analysing stakeholder values and perceptions concerning various landscape components. The purpose is to show that landscape content and land cover interactions with societal connections should be a base for land use development. The practical goal is to deliberate research tools to quantify public opinions and attitudes, which could form bases for developing of decision support tools. The main research objectives are: (1) to assess existing opinions concerning land use changes and provide a clearer insight into public attitudes to the role of woodlands for an integrated development of the countryside; (2) to place ecological and socio-economic values on inanimate natural components of landscapes; and (3) to assess values and preferences held by land use policy and management experts regarding multiple landscape components and features to assist in decision-making. Through the different levels of importance (values) accorded by the respondents to the integration of nature components in rural landscapes public priorities were identified. The paper develops an understanding of why certain aspects of land use changes are unfavourably viewed by some people and favourably received by others. It suggests some innovative perspectives on the areas of consensus and conflict between people, providing initial information for the selection and evaluation of land use management decisions.     

Introduction: Land rights,restitution, politics,and war in Colombia

This paper introduces contributions to a symposium that report some of the findings and arguments to emerge from a collaborative research project involving five Colombian universities forming the Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad Agraria (Observatory of Restitution and Regulation of Agrarian Property Rights). In a number of ways, the research presented in the symposium advances understanding of the political economy of rural Colombia, and of war in Colombia, and the papers, drawing on the original evidence collected by Observatorio researchers, develop arguments that have a wider relevance too for agrarian political economy and the understanding of violent conflict. In particular, the papers highlight the direct participation of elites in violent conflict; the varieties and nuances of wartime primitive accumulation; the complexities of the state's role in wartime agrarian political economy; the gender dimensions of agrarian conflict; the interaction of war and law; and the significance for service provision of farm size. As Colombia—hopefully—passes from long war to peace, these arguments and this evidence may be valuable in debates about what kind of peace can develop.     

Social dimensions of market-based instruments: Introduction

This themed issue of Land Use Policy builds on the papers presented at an international symposium entitled Social Dimensions of Market-based Instruments, convened by the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, in November 2010. The symposium set out to review the extent to which market-based instruments were being employed as social policy tools in various contexts, what challenges achieving relevant social policy objectives posed, what trade-offs arose between environmental, social and economic objectives, and whether and how tensions could be resolved. The contributions to this themed issue provide conceptual-theoretical and empirical takes on the topic. They consider poverty, property rights and equality perspectives of participation and quantify social implications at the program, regional and national levels. They reveal converging messages, e.g. in relation to treatment of poverty, common property rights and nesting across scales. In combination, the papers make a compelling case that social implications of MBIs cannot be ignored and ought to be considered in design and evaluation even if programs do no pursue social objectives, as social dimensions can enhance or affect program effectiveness and efficiency. In doing so, the contributions expand the role that MBIs can play in ensuring sustainable resource use and offer considerations for policy design.     

How to build multifunctional agricultural landscapes in the U.S. Corn Belt: Add perennials and partnerships

Conservation of ecosystem services in agricultural regions worldwide is foundational to, but often perceived to be in competition with, other societal outcomes, including food and energy production and thriving rural communities. To address this tension, we engaged regional leaders in agriculture, conservation, and policy from the state of Iowa (USA) in a participatory workshop and follow-up interviews. Our goal was to determine constraints to, and leverage points for, broad-scale implementation of practices that use perennial vegetation to bolster ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. Qualitative analysis of workshop and interview data highlighted the complexity involved in achieving multi-objective societal outcomes across privately owned, working landscapes—especially as the Corn Belt region enters a period of rapid reorganization driven by the demand for bioenergy crops. These leaders indicated that initiatives focusing on perennials have the potential to span differences between conservation and agricultural interests by blurring the distinction between working lands and protected areas. Landscape change that transcends private property boundaries to accomplish this goal is dependent upon: (1) facilitation of vertical and horizontal forms of social capital between social actors from different scales and perspectives, and (2) scale appropriate mechanisms that increase the value of perennial practices for farm owners and operators. Our data highlight the adaptive capacity of regional actors to act as intermediaries to shape macro-scale markets, technologies, and policies in ways that are compatible with the needs, the capabilities, and the conservation of local human and natural resources.     

Characterizing European cultural landscapes: Accounting for structure,management intensity and value of agricultural and forest landscapes

Almost all rural areas in Europe have been shaped or altered by humans and can be considered cultural landscapes, many of which now are considered to entail valuable cultural heritage. Current dynamics in land management have put cultural landscapes under a huge pressure of agricultural intensification and land abandonment. To prevent the loss of cultural landscapes, knowledge on the location of different types of cultural landscapes is needed. In this paper, we present a characterization of European cultural landscapes based on the prevalence of three key dimensions of cultural landscapes: landscape structure, management intensity, and value and meaning. We mapped these dimensions across Europe at a 1-km resolution by combining proxies on management intensity and landscape structure with new indicators such as social media usage and registered traditional food products. We integrated the three dimensions into a continuous “cultural landscape index” that allows for a characterization of Europe’s rural landscapes. The characterization identifies hotspots of cultural landscapes, where all three dimensions are present, such as in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Eastern and Northern European cultural landscapes are mostly characterized by only one of the dimensions. Our paper can help to identify pressures to cultural landscapes and thus to target measures for the conservation of these landscapes, to link similar landscapes in different regions, and to inform policy design on the most important characteristics of cultural landscapes at a regional scale.     

Women's Land Rights and Rural Social Movements in the Brazilian Agrarian Reform

This article examines the evolution of the demand for women's land rights in the Brazilian agrarian reform through the prism of the three main rural social movements: the landless movement, the rural unions and the autonomous rural women's movement. Most of the credit for raising the issue of women's land rights rests with women within the rural unions. That women's formal land rights were attained in the constitutional reform of 1988 was largely a by–product of the effort to end discrimination against women in all it dimensions. The achievement of formal equality in land rights, nonetheless, did not lead to increases in the share of female beneficiaries of the reform, which remained low in the mid–1990s. This was largely because securing women's land rights in practice was not a top priority of any of the rural social movements. Moreover, the main social movement determining the pace of the agrarian reform, the landless movement, considered class and gender issues to be incompatible. By the late 1990s, nonetheless, there was growing awareness that failure to recognize women's land rights was prejudicial to the development and consolidation of the agrarian reform settlements and thus the movement. The growing consensus among all the rural social movements of the importance of securing women's land rights, coupled with effective lobbying, encouraged the State in 2001 to adopt specific mechanisms for the inclusion of women in the agrarian reform.     

Socio-environmental drivers of forest change in rural Uganda

Tropical deforestation and forest degradation are among the top global threats to biodiversity, carbon storage and rural livelihoods, but the social processes underlying these changes remain difficult to observe across large spatial scales and in data-poor contexts such as tropical Africa. We link longitudinal survey data from agricultural households in rural Uganda to high-resolution satellite data on forest cover change, and use this linked dataset to investigate processes at two scales: tree planting and harvesting at the parcel scale, and deforestation and reforestation at the community scale. This multi-scale analysis reveals that tree planting is more common on parcels with secure tenure, by educated heads and in isolated communities. Deforestation is highest in land-rich, agrarian communities with low population density and high baseline forest cover. These results provide explicit evidence that the social drivers of forest change in Uganda vary across scales, indicating a need for additional multi-scale studies.     

Social metabolism,landscape change and land-use planning in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region

The present work explores the synergies between socio-metabolic energy use and landscape patterns, starting from the hypothesis that there is a complex and changing relationship between the efficiency in both the societal use of energy, and land-use, and the ecosystem functioning of the whole land matrix of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (BMR). It first compares changes in the social metabolism (i.e. the total energy or material throughput of the economy) and in landscape structure and function from 1850 to the present in three municipalities of the Vallès county (N of the BMR), as a first attempt to establish a link between the societal uses of land and energy together with their impact on landscape patterns. Secondly, the study explores the role of natural versus rural landscapes on the maintaining of basic functional properties such as connectivity in the whole BMR. We base our analyses on parametric methodologies that describe both structural and functional properties of landscapes, aimed at assessing the landscape efficiency of both energy-use and land-use planning. The first comparison reveals that the simultaneous loss of energy efficiency and land-use efficiency from the mid-19th century to present can be tracked by changes in the functional landscape structure. The second study shows the importance of the traditional rural landscapes in maintaining the ecological quality of non-built-up land. In consequence, the organized complexity of the land system necessary to host biodiversity and basic ecological processes cannot be guaranteed if the agro-forestry mosaic is not taken into account, together with the network of protected areas.     

Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental Movements in Indonesia

This essay examines the convergences, tensions and mutual influences of agrarian and environmental movements in Indonesia and their connections to transnational movements under state-led development and neoliberal governance regimes. The authors argue that environmental movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century affected the strategies, struggles, mutual relations with, and public discourses of resurgent agrarian movements in diverse ways. Environmental movements had significant influences on national policy, law and practice within a decade of their emergence under the state-led development regime of President Suharto. Environmental activists used the appearance of technical 'apolitical' concerns to their advantage. They mobilized at multiple scales, targeting laws and other institutions of state power at the same time as organizing the grassroots. The repression of the Suharto regime forced agrarian reform activists underground, while environmental issues were mainstreamed. Agrarian movements in Indonesia today, under a decentralized regime dominated by neoliberal policies, have faced new opportunities and constraints due to national and transnational influences of environmental and agrarian reform discourses and networks. We show how these influences have changed the political fields within which Indonesian agrarian movement groups operate: forming, shifting and struggling over critical alliances.     

Urban population looking for rural landscapes: Different appreciation patterns identified in Southern Europe

In the context of the peripheral European rural landscapes, the role of the urban population, generally referred to as the ‘outsiders’, has shown to be influential in the dynamics of rural space. This influence occurs namely through the demand for non-productive functions leading to the emergence of new modes of occupancy. In addition, the emerging policy framework concerning policies and planning in rural landscapes call for an improved understanding of the diversified social demands for these landscapes. We argue that a more profound knowledge on the urban demand for rural landscape is needed to better integrate the urban interests into rural policy and planning. The present paper aims to gain greater insight on this demand by identifying landscape preferences of urban users, framed by the multifunctional transition theory, and using a photo-based survey with contrasting land covers derived from CORINE Land Cover classes. Furthermore, the use of land cover classes as the main landscape component, and thereby relating preferences to specific land covers, offers a sound basis for a territorial approach, able to integrate landscape into rural policy and land use planning practice. A case-study in Southern Portugal was developed at the regional scale and results showed different appreciation patterns for rural landscapes varying from humanised and more naturalised landscapes according to the different functions sought by urban users. Another prominent result is that urban demand for rural landscapes, even if driven by consumption, is strongly influenced by both protection and production values. A deeper knowledge on the interests of urban population can be a step forward for rural communities, land managers, and sectoral policy decision-makers to better define investment strategies in rural-urban partnerships facing the growing urban demand over rural space.     

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District,North‐West Cambodia

In Cambodia, the interactions between large‐scale land investment and land titling gathered particular momentum in 2012–13, when the government initiated an unprecedented upland land titling programme in an attempt to address land tenure insecurity where large‐scale land investment overlaps with land appropriated by peasants. This paper is based on a spatially explicit ethnography of land rights conducted in the Samlaut district of north‐west Cambodia – a former Khmer Rouge resistance stronghold – in a context where the enclosures are both incomplete and entangled with post‐war, socially embedded land tenure systems. We discuss how this new pattern of fragmentation affects the prevailing dynamics of agrarian change. We argue that it has introduced new forms of exclusion and a generalized perception of land tenure uncertainty that is managed by peasants through the actualization of hybrid land tenure arrangements borrowing from state rules and local consensus. In contrast with common expectations about land formalization, the process reinforces the patterns of social differentiation initiated by land rent capture practices of early migrants and pushes more vulnerable peasants into seeking wage labour and resorting to job migration.     

Changes in property-use relationships on French farmland: A social innovation perspective

Land issues are a major constraint for resource management, whether it relates to urban planning, environmental protection or agricultural development. There is presently a proliferation of initiatives by a diversity of actors, that produce notable changes in terms of land tenure. A few studies have described some of them in France, without analysing the change mechanisms. Moreover, land tenure is often difficult to understand given its complexity and its multiple dimensions. Here, we propose an analysis of land tenure changes with the lens of property-use relationships (PUR), through a social innovation framework. This allows us to analyse the collective action at the heart of change. The analysis rests upon two case studies selected for their multiscale character, and as two different entries to scrutinize land changes: the “Terre de Liens” movement, a new actor stemming from civil society; and the “rural land lease subject to environmental clauses”, a recent authorized instrument of tenancy contract. These land tenure changes are important although circumscribed because they involve all actors’ spheres and scales and create new frameworks. These changes contribute to express societal demands through new lessor’s management right. Where the parties to the PUR share a common reference framework and the same agricultural development objective, the conditions set out in the PUR seem guaranteed. If they do not, a mutual acculturation process seems necessary – beyond the contractual terms – to enable a compromise between the management rationales of a protected area in one hand, and a farm on the other hand.     

Assessing the ability of rural agrarian areas to provide cultural ecosystem services (CES): A multi scale social indicator framework (MSIF)

Assessing the ways in which rural agrarian areas provide Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) is proving difficult to achieve. This research has developed an innovative methodological approach named as Multi Scale Indicator Framework (MSIF) for capturing the CES embedded into the rural agrarian areas. This framework reconciles a literature review with a transdisciplinary participatory workshop. Both of these sources reveal that societal preferences diverge upon judgemental criteria which in turn relate to different visual concepts that can be drawn from analyzing attributes, elements, features and characteristics of rural areas. We contend that it is now possible to list a group of possible multi scale indicators for stewardship, diversity and aesthetics. These results might also be of use for improving any existing European indicators frameworks by also including CES. This research carries major implications for policy at different levels of governance, as it makes possible to target and monitor policy instruments to the physical rural settings so that cultural dimensions are adequately considered. There is still work to be developed on regional specific values and thresholds for each criteria and its indicator set. In practical terms, by developing the conceptual design within a common framework as described in this paper, a considerable step forward toward the inclusion of the cultural dimension in European wide assessments can be made.     

Roads from Calabria: The Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy

Scholars of agrarian change have long debated the nature of capitalist transition in the countryside, including whether the deepened interlinking of local, national, and transnational economic activities make past trajectories of agrarian transformation unlikely to reoccur in the present. This essay makes the case that Giovanni Arrighi's work has much to add to our understanding of the agrarian question in global historical perspective. We focus in particular on Arrighi's research on trajectories of change in the Calabrian region of southern Italy, and his essay “Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments.” In this piece, Arrighi and co‐author Fortunata Piselli develop two key insights. The first is that the pathways to capitalism are diverse, non‐linear, and historically contingent such that within one country—or, in the case of Italy, a single subnational region—multiple trajectories can be found. The second is that the outcomes of capitalist transition vary based on a country's position in the international hierarchy of wealth, meaning that agrarian transformation is compatible with both economic development and underdevelopment. We describe the three methodological principles that enabled Arrighi to develop his analysis of capitalist transition and explain how the papers collected in this special issue reflect and extend the Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy.     

'Changing Before Our Very Eyes': Agrarian Questions and the Politics of Land in Capitalism Today

This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of 'small' or 'family' farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the 'classic' agrarian question in capitalist transition, in effect the agrarian question of capital in which the agrarian question of labour was once subsumed. Here the question is posed whether, in the conditions of contemporary 'globalization' and its tendency to the 'fragmentation' of labour, there might be a new agrarian question of labour, now detached from that of capital, and which generates a new politics of struggles over land (and its distribution). Even to conceive of this question is beyond the analytical and political field of vision of neo-classical populism. Some of the dimensions of an agrarian question of labour are illustrated in a brief consideration of recent, and highly contradictory, events in Zimbabwe: a unique case of comprehensive, regime-sanctioned, confiscatory land redistribution in the world today.     

From feudal colonization to agrarian capitalism in Mallorca: Peasant endurance under the rise and fall of large estates (1229–1900)

The colonization of Mallorca gave rise to a late‐feudal agrarian society that evolved towards capitalism based on large estates owned by noblemen who hired large numbers of wage labourers from among smallholders living in agro‐towns, the dispossessed remnants of a formerly wealthier peasantry. These well‐off peasants originated from when the colonization frontier was open in the 13th and 14th centuries, but had been defeated when three peasant–plebeian revolts were crushed. Afterwards, Mallorca followed a latifundist transition towards agrarian capitalism similar to southern Italy or Spain, in sharp contrast with the middle‐peasant paths seen in Catalonia or Valencia. The land rent rose, while agricultural wages fell from 1659 to 1800. Peasant families could not survive, and had to supplement wages with the products of their own plots. This set a socio‐agroecological limit to growth in this agrarian class structure. The agrarian crisis at the end of the 19th century bankrupted the Mallorcan nobility. Bankers bought much of the land and sold it on as small allotments. This expanded the intensive cropping formerly limited to agro‐town belts, giving rise to a new “peasantization”. Despite their subordination, Mallorcan peasants had survived and created complex agroecological landscapes endowed with a rich biocultural heritage.     

Challenges for land system science

While considerable progress has been made in understanding land use change, land system science continues to face a number of grand challenges. This paper discusses these challenges with a focus on empirical land system studies, land system modelling and the analysis of future visions of land system change. Contemporary landscapes are contingent outcomes of past and present patterns, processes and decisions. Thus, empirical analysis of past and present land-use change has an important role in providing insights into the socio-economic and ecological processes that shape land use transitions. This is especially important with respect to gradual versus rapid land system dynamics and in understanding changes in land use intensity. Combining the strengths of empirical analysis with multi-scale modelling will lead to new insights into the processes driving land system change. New modelling methods that combine complex systems thinking at a local level with macro-level economic analysis of the land system would reconcile the multi-scale dynamics currently encapsulated in bottom-up and top-down modelling approaches. Developments in land use futures analysis could focus on integrating explorative scenarios that reflect possible outcomes with normative visions that identify desired outcomes. Such an approach would benefit from the broad and in-depth involvement of stakeholders in order to link scientific findings to political and societal decision-making culminating in a set of key choices and consequences. Land system models have an important role in supporting future land use policy, but model outputs require scientific interpretation rather than being presented as predictions. The future of land system science is strongly dependent on the research community's capacity to bring together the elements of research discussed in the paper, via empirical data collection and analysis of observed processes, computer simulation across scale levels and futures analysis of alternative, normative visions through stakeholder engagement.     

Changing Land Rights Means Changing Society: The Sociopolitical Effects of Agrarian Reforms under the Government of Evo Morales

Agrarian reform cannot be limited to a linear process of land distribution. It involves a societal restructuration that affects power relations, multi‐level governance structures, the (re)spatialization of juridical legitimacy and symbolic boundaries between sociocultural groups (ethnicity). This paper analyses the consequences of the major Bolivian agrarian reforms of 1953, 1996 and 2006 for the current process of setting up the ‘plurinational’ state under the government of Evo Morales. Using a historical and sociopolitical approach, we show that the ethnically differentiated devolution of individual and collective tenure rights has resulted in an institutional segmentation along ethnic boundaries that gives rise to a growing polarization between the two socially constructed categories of indigenous people and peasants. This institutional segmentation is not limited to agrarian questions but also affects other domains, such as political processes related to territorial autonomies. The current government is trying to maintain a neutral position by giving priority to large‐scale national programmes of economic development.