Introduction
Along with CAP instruments market intervention, other policy tools, particularly regulatory and legal as well as information and suasory instruments are available for encouraging landscape management and environmental farming practices.
Regulatory and legal Instruments
Amongst the regulatory and legal instruments it is distinguished between direct regulations and spatial planning. Direct regulations form legally binding, statutory norms and standards, and apply at different scales of regulation, e.g. EU-28, national, regional, municipal level. They can be structured along the regulation objectives, referring to the management of natural resources (e.g. Water Framework Directive), protection of areas (e.g. Natura 2000) or specific species (Birds Directive).
In terms of policy mechanisms, we distinguish ordinance of inputs (into the farming system), outputs (e.g. emissions) and processes (e.g. management practices). Spatial planning and policy also applies at the different scales (from EU-28 to local) and formulates requirements at different levels of complexity, e.g. related to sectors, land use types, environmental indicators. Different instruments prevail at different scales which are designed based on and apply either opportunistic, quantitative (space standards) models, shape-related models, landscape-related models. These models, distinguishing demand from supply related approaches, which are either useful in urban areas (demand) or natural rural areas (supply).
Information and Suasory Instruments
Through communicative action, addressing intrinsic motivation and encouraging collaboration of stakeholders, information and suasory instruments are particularly governance-oriented approaches. They are classified as either voluntary agreements, moral suasion of objective information and subjective value patterns of single economic decision by individual decision makers, by informing e.g. about social costs of their behaviour, pleas for ethical behaviour, non-monetary social sanctions. Information measures are often coupled with other, mainly market intervention measures.
Empirical Case Study Evidence
Regulatory Instruments
In several case study regions, such as the Mittleres Ennstal (AT), the Nature Park Märkische Schweiz (DE) or the General Chlapowski Landscape Park (PL)) larger parts of the landscape are under some form of nature conservation. Often different type of zones with higher (nature protection, Natura2000, Special Protection Area) or lower degree of protection (nature or landscape parks) are applied in a complementing way. Objectives include surface and groundwater protection, protection of flora and fauna as well as the conservation of the appearance of the cultural landscape.
It has been found in the Germancase, that the landscape within the nature conservation area is richer in term of landscape structure and elements: the average field size is nearly one third larger within (18.0 ha) the nature park than outside (24.5 ha). Also higher densities of green linear (tree rows and hedges) and point elements (groups of trees, small stands, riparian vegetation) exist in within the agricultural areas of the nature park boundaries.
In the Polish case, the establishment and maintenance of the protected area showed a great role in landscape valorisation – through protection activities of shelterbelts itself (safeguarding employment and income in rural areas), sustaining the productive capacity, but also through awareness raising within the local society (place-making).
Evidence Information Instruments
The case of the AustrianMittleres Ennstal a Social Network Analysis revealed that the agents and institutions in the study region are able to pursue in partly common (but also different) strategies of landscape valorisation with “agricultural production”, “tourism” and “regional products” as key agents. Through communicative action and intermediate agents (Teaching and Research Centre, LEADER Region), the connections between the different agents in the network are very dense and contribute to strategy making. It has been also found that for the strategy implementation for landscape valorisation particularly education, knowledge transfer and network building is required.
Conclusions & recommendations
There is only little evidence on the role of regulatory and information instruments. Particularly, nature conservation is applied only in some areas with specific conservation requirements, but shows effectiveness to control landscape management along with their nature and natural resource conservation objectives.
In terms of landscape valorisation, particularly information and suasory types of instruments represent promising means of governance. Communicative action fosters networking, collaboration of and negations between the different agents and stakeholder in the region, enhancing the strategy-making and identification of common development goals.