Society's objectives for agro-landscapes as expressed in law

A systematic analysis of European and Austrian law identified a surprising multitude of binding objectives for agro-landscapes and their main driving force, the food supply chain. This paper describes methods for identifying, classifying and interpreting societal objectives in legal documents. It illustrates the application of the methods and provides insight into political intentions regarding the sustainable management of agro-landscapes. The results indicate some objectives with a high potential for steering the whole system and others, which are particularly reactive to changes in the system and therefore perfect indicators of the state of a system. The applied method proved to be a straightforward and transparent approach for dealing with numerous interdependent objectives.