Guiding rural landscape change

Public policy interventions concerning rural landscapes have grown significantly in recent decades in many developed countries and internationally, in response to a range of imperatives. These include concern for declining biodiversity, heritage and social wellbeing in the face of urbanisation, and structural change in rural economies involving both agricultural intensification and extensification. The public policy response has been a fragmented array of measures, both horizontally (across policy sectors) and vertically (across political-administrative-organisational levels). Against this background, rural landscape policy approaches are analysed in respect to their instrumentality and spatial logic, informed by Hägerstrand's concepts of territorial and spatial competence. A framework for local policy making and policy integration inspired by landscape strategy making approaches is presented and illustrated through four Danish experiments in rural landscapes of various scale and with different policy issues. Results suggest that landscape strategy making represents a promising way to improve policy integration in rural contexts but research is needed to find suitable ways to engage large scale intensive farming with the community based process.