A DSS model for the governance of sustainable rural landscape: A first application to the cultural landscape of Orcia Valley (Tuscany, Italy)

There is a growing interest on landscape and landscape policy and planning, especially since the adoption of the European Landscape Convention in 2000. This latter defines landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. In the case of rural landscape, this means that an appropriate governance model should not only involve local stakeholders in a participative approach, but also take into account natural characteristics, cultural aspects of the past and present, and socio-economic aspects, since agriculture is the main driver of change for rural landscapes. Farm strategies are influenced by internal and by external factors, these latter being related to market conditions and to constraints and opportunities given by policies. Market globalization and Agricultural policies are consequently having a strong impact on landscape, that public institutions try to neutralise setting rules about landscape conservation. Thus, due to its specific features, landscape is impacted both by several sectorial and territorial policies which have none or very low coordination among them. Indeed, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has often shown a negative influence on landscape, also in the case of Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) intended to promote landscape. In this framework, the aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive model for the governance of rural landscape and a first simplified application to a cultural landscape. This model is based on the integration of a geographical multi-criteria analysis, an advanced GIS-based geo-processing tools, and participatory techniques aiming to understand and foresee local stakeholders' behaviours through focus-groups and dedicated interviews. The identification of future landscape scenarios is based on the integration of past evolution (historical analysis), landscape sensitivity (territorial analysis) and farmers' adaptation to market and policy changes (farm analysis). A simplified version of the model was tailored and tested in the municipality of Castiglione d'Orcia of the Siena province in Tuscany, Italy, one of the UNESCO cultural landscapes, but is the Authors' opinion that its approach