Teresa Pinto Correia

Challenges for a shared European countryside of uncertain future. Towards a modern community-based landscape perspective

Abstract This paper addresses current changes in the highly diverse European landscape, and the way these transitions are being treated in policy and landscape management in the fragmented, heterogeneous and dynamic context of today’s Europe. It appears that intersecting driving forces are increasing the complexity of European landscapes and causing polarising developments in agricultural land use, biodiversity conservation and cultural landscape management. On the one hand, multifunctional rural landscapes, especially in peri-urban regions, provide services and functions that serve the citizens in their demand for identity, support their sense of belonging and offer opportunities for recreation and involvement in practical landscape management. On the other hand, industrial agricultural production on increasingly large farms produces food, feed, fibre and energy to serve expanding international markets with rural liveability and accessibility as a minor issue. The intermediate areas of traditionally dominant small and family farms in Europe seem to be gradually declining in profitability. The paper discusses the potential of a governance approach that can cope with the requirement of optimising land-sharing conditions and community-based landscape development, while adapting to global market conditions.

Editorial: Living Landscape: The European Landscape Convention in Research Perspective

This special issue reports some of the highlights of the conference Living Landscape – The European Landscape Convention in Research Perspective, organised jointly by UNISCAPE and Landscape Europe ...

How can the land managers and his multi-stakeholder network at the farm level influence the multifunctional transitions pathways?

The changing role of agriculture is at the core of transition pathways in many rural areas. Productivism, post-productivism and multifunctionality have been targeted towards a possible conceptualization of the transition happening in rural areas. The factors of change, including productivist and post-productivist trends, are combined in various ways and have gone in quite diverse directions and intensities, in individual regions and localities. Even, in the same holding, productivist and post-productivist strategies can coexist spatially, temporally, structurally, leading to a higher complexity in changing patterns. In south Portugal extensive landscapes, dominated by traditionally managed agro-forestry systems under a fuzzy land use pattern, multifunctionality at the farm level is indeed conducted by different stakeholders whose interests may or not converge: a multifunctional land management may indeed incorporate post-productivist and productivist agents. These stakeholders act under different levels of decision, management and use, reflecting a particular land management dynamic, in which different interests may exist, from commercial production to a variety of other functions (hunting, bee-keeping, subsistence farming, etc.), influencing management at the farm level and its supposed transition trajectory. This multi-stakeholder dynamic is composed by a main land-manager (the one who takes the main decisions), secondary land-managers (land-managers under the rules of the main land-manager), workers and users (locals or outsiders), as also hybrid situations can occur. Each of these can influence the land management in different ways as their interest and action within the holding may vary differently and therefore reflect more or less multifunctional systems, and also a different situation in a spectrum that goes from productivism to postproductivism. The goal of the proposed presentation is to show the evidence of productivist and non-productivist strategies linked with multifunctional transitions in place, which are the land managers types in place, their attitudes and behaviors and how each of the land manager types behave regarding the multi-stakeholders network but also to describe the multi-stakeholder relations at the farm level and the consequences regarding multifunctional transitions happening in place.

Chapter 23: The Multifunctional Landscape of Marvão, central Portugal: Can high valued non commodity functions support the maintenance of small scale farm landscapes in the periphery of Europe?

The landscape of Marvao is unique, in that it still combines two components of traditional Mediterranean agricultural landscapes: large estates with silvopastoral areas of montado in the north, on slopes with poor soils, extensively managed, mainly for cattle grazing; and a small scale mosaic landscape in the south, in the large fertile valleys, on small properties owned and cultivated mostly by elderly farmers, with a variety of crops and uses, and surrounded by forests, with scrub on the slopes. The result is a distinctive, contrasting landscape, whose striking character relates to its diversity, the intensity of use in the valleys, and the remarkable small town of Marvao, which is currently a candidate for UNESCO World Heritage status. Nowadays, this landscape is valued mostly for aesthetic, cultural and recreational purposes, but it is nevertheless undergoing change. Keywords: cultural landscape; fertile valleys; Marvao landscape; UNESCO World Heritage status