Community Governance for Sustainable Landscapes: Values, Rules, and Institutions
“Landscape means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of nature and/or human factors” (European Landscape Convention, 2000).
Since the revolutionary definition of “landscape” in the European Landscape Convention, the scope of what is understood by this notion has extended from a focus on the biophysical dimension to a more comprehensive understanding that includes cultural, ecological, social and economic aspects, stressing the interactions of humans and the environment that shape and unfold within a landscape: How humans operate landscape systems is key to landscape change.
Human interventions into landscapes are usually the result of complex decision-making processes in which stakeholders cooperate or enter into conflict with each other, based on their rules and objectives. Understanding the mechanisms of such ‘landscape governance’ is fundamental to promoting sustainable transformation.
Landscape governance at multiple scales
“Landscape governance relates to how various interests in the landscape are balanced in decision-making and how the rules stimulate the sustainable management of landscape resources.” (De Graaf et al., 2017)
As landscape governance is embedded in social processes, it comes with the complexity of multiple-level decision-making processes and their interactions. ‘Governance’ was originally understood as regulations established by governmental institutions. Since the 1990s, however, the fact that decision-making processes happen at multiple-levels — from the national via the regional and local, towards the individual — was more and more recognized, thus extending the meaning of the term.
Since the publication of the European Landscape Convention in 2000, supporting tools have been created to facilitate landscape management, such as Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) and policies promoting the cooperation among countries and regions. However, such national and regional management frameworks are hardly applicable on the level of local landscapes, which are influenced by the values, identities and objectives of local communities. Landscape management at community level responds to this deficiency:
Through cooperation, community members can create effective institutions in governing local resource systems. Communities thus often play an important role in natural resource management.
Community resource management was first discussed in research on common-pool resources. For a long time, it was believed that the proper management of such ‘commons’ can only be achieved through privatization or government control. Researchers such as Elinor Ostrom in her famous book Governing the Commons:The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), however, found that through trust and reciprocity, communities can be successful in establishing and sustaining resource management institutions. The design principles she describes have been verified in plenty of community-based resource systems and are now extended to broader social-ecological systems research.
So, how can communities’ institutional arrangements contribute to sustainable landscape development?
The success of an institutional arrangement can be evaluated in many regards, but the key and most apparent result is that it sustains the ability of landscapes to provide products and services. As discussed above, landscapes are comprehensive systems containing social, cultural, economic and ecological values. The institutions promoting landscape sustainability across those dimensions can therefore be summarized as economically balanced, ecologically far-sighted, socially recognized, and culturally embedded. These dimensions interact with each other to promote a sustainable landscape, but they do have variables specific to each.
Economic balance
In a community-based resource system, the economic dimension is the key factor influencing whether and how people implement and maintain institutions, no matter if it mainly provides direct profits like production, or indirect benefits related to human wellbeing. For most resource systems that perform production functions — such as fishery and forestry systems — , rules to balance the proportion between costs and benefits are important for promoting success. In systems that already lost their production function but still provide other kinds of benefits (such as biodiversity, or cultural values), the key issue is to clarify who steps in to prevent their abandonment. In such cases, economic support by government and non-governmental organizations is extremely important: In the under-used grassland system of Tarōji, Japan, for example, local volunteers provided labor and traditional knowledge, while the village and local governments contributed financially on behalf of taxpayers and indirect beneficiaries, so that the system could finally be sustained (see Shimada 2015).
Ecological far-sightedness
Ecosystems and the biophyiscal resources they provide form the bases for the functioning of social-ecological systems, which is why it is important for decision-makers to establish institutions to maintain them. The basic way is to set appropriation rules that match local social and environmental conditions, such as restrictions on time, boundaries and quantity of resource use.
In successfully managed systems, people have realized that they are just temporary users of the resources, and one day the latter will be inherited by others.
With the appropriate rules and concerns, the long-lasting productivity of resources can be guaranteed along with the maintenance of the overall ecosystem.
Social recognition
The implementation of rules relies on the recognition and collaboration of community members, and an institution at community level can only be successful in this regard if it speaks to social identity and promotes social cohesion. Thus, a clear definition of rules (be it rights, or boundaries) is necessary in order to communicate effectively, make binding agreements, and arrange for monitoring and enforcement processes. The implementation of institutions can entail many failures on the social level, e.g. if strong policies are implemented while neglecting community members their rights to participate in decision-making, thus reducing their enthusiasm and willingness to cooperate; or if no compensations for the appropriators’ losses are proposed when imposing restrictions to resource use.
Cultural embeddedness
Lastly, considering that resource users are involved in a cultural system of meanings, symbols and values, institutional arrangements are constructed in a cultural context. That is to say, an institution should not be regarded as only consisting of rules based on which people pursue individual interests and corresponding strategies. Its cultural dimension should be taken into account, e.g. the fundamental worldviews, traditions and perceptions of the environment.
Institutions are not only based on what is called ‘incentives’, but also on the context conditions and motivations encouraging community members to make collaborative efforts to govern a landscape.
Community-level governance in the Pearl River Delta
In my PhD research, I am currently studying the institutional arrangements surrounding the dike-pond system in the Pearl River Delta in Southern China, which I have already introduced in my last blogpost Exploring sustainable landscape management in a dike-pond system. It is a multi-functional land-use system, based on pond fishery.
Since the 1980s, land in this area has been involved in the market and is rented out to farmers for a settled period. Each community has a committee composed by several representatives, mainly responsible for formulating plans concerning the resource management, and villagers have the right to vote whether to support it.
To start with, a public bidding system has been a stable way of renting out the land and benefit the community in this area during the last decades. Based on this management framework, the committee would organize a meeting on land distribution every several years (for now it is every 5 years). In this meeting, the committee sets a basic price for each land unit, and farmers compete in offering their own prices based on their evaluation of the quality of patches. For each land unit, the farmer who offers the highest price is entitled to use the land for the next time period.
One important thing here is to decide whether the land is accessible to outsiders or not. This depends how much farmland the village owns as well as on the number of community members who want to engage in farming. When deciding on who has rights to participate in land distribution, the willingness of community members and the collective income are considered. A further issue is to give the land a proper base price: If the price is too high, no one would bid for the land, while if it is lower than expected, this would decrease collective income, causing a shortage of money for managing other resources.
Moreover, the committee and the farmers need to cooperate and decide on the responsibilities of both sides. The committee would usually take care of collective infrastructures: In the 1990s, for example, when water transport was replaced by the more efficient transport on land, the committee took over responsibility for the construction of roads, thus eventually changing the landscapes’ overall spatial structure. At the individual level, after getting the land, farmers can make their own decisions on production for the settled time period, e.g. concerning management intensity and farming rhythms, albeit without harming the environment. If they violated the rules, the committee would take back the land.
Thus it can be seen that in the dike-pond system, the community level is of great importance in landscape governance and resource management. The exact variables and interactions among different levels of governance, however, still require further exploration.
If you are interested to learn more, stay up to date and follow my future research on the landscape govenance of the dike-pond system.
References:
Council of Europe (2000). European Landscape Convention [ETS OBL], [2007–09–13]. Online: https://rm.coe.int/european-landscape-convention-book-text-feb-2008-en/16802f80c6
Graaf, M. D., Buck, L., Shames, S., & Zagt, R. (2017). Assessing landscape governance: a participatory approach. Assessing landscape governance: a participatory approach. Online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322209661_Assessing_landscape_governance_-_a_participatory_approach
Shimada, D. (2015). Multi-level natural resources governance based on local community: A case study on semi-natural grassland in Tarōji, Nara, Japan. International Journal of the Commons, 9(2), 486–509. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.510
