How to develop a less favored area of high nature value?
Agricultural landscapes of high nature value are threatened by land conversion and land abandonment across Europe. Extremadura, Spain, is a region where rich natural and cultural heritage are under pressure from multiple socioeconomic challenges.
Here are some personal impressions of three decades of rural development in this outstanding region.
Summer was hot in 1992 when I first traveled to Extremadura. It was a time of major celebrations in Spain — Barcelona ran the Summer Olympics, Sevilla hosted the EXPO World Exhibition, and the whole country commemorated the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage from Huelva to the Americas. But in Extremadura, a landlocked region of seemingly endless oak rangelands, life had remained quiet.
The region extends along the border to Portugal and had long been known for its outstanding biodiversity and landscape beauty. I had come here for an internship with a conservation NGO. Later on, I came back again and again — for youth exchanges, a master thesis, a PhD dissertation, and a number of research projects. Until now, I have been able to work in this region for almost 30 years.
Extremadura is an archetypical rural region that is rich in natural and cultural values, but has long been lagging behind in social and economic development compared to other parts of Europe. By that, it may be similar to regions such as Transylvania (Romania), Brandenburg (Germany), Alentejo (Portugal), or the Scottish highlands and islands (UK). For more than three decades, national and EU rural development and many other public funds have been directed towards Extremadura. These funds come from different policy sectors and domains, but typically have in common that they aim to achieve economic development while managing the region’s rich natural resources sustainably.
How did this rural area develop?
At a recent re-visit to Extremadura, I had the opportunity to discuss with old (and new) friends and colleagues — most notably Fernando Pulido and Isaac García — impressions of how rural development and other policies have changed land use and landscapes in the area. So here are some key personal observations and thoughts about rural development of a less favored area of high nature value.
Human population numbers of rural Extremadura have been declining over decades, and this trend continues until today.
Rural outmigration (both to regional cities and to places outside Extremadura) has been a continuous, gradual process, unhalted until today. It seems that many villages are now arriving at a point of undershooting basic thresholds, with severe consequences for the maintenance of basic infrastructure such as schools.
A vicious cycle of even more fundamental shifts toward rural abandonment and loss of quality of life in the region’s villages may be observed in future.
Rural depopulation is a most important development trend for cultural landscapes in Extremadura, as their landscape values have been generated by human activities. Awareness for the severity of this problem has been raised through “La España vaciada” discourses in national politics, but few solutions have been found to reverse this trend so far. Rural development in Extremadura has been without success as long as these depopulation trends continue.
In contrast to human populations, rural Extremadura has been able to stabilize much of its bird population numbers and other biological values.
Populations of globally threatened species such as Cinereous Vulture, Spanish Imperial Eagle, or Iberian Lynx have recovered or are even expanding. While millions of scattered oaks — the defining feature of the biodiversity-rich dehesa land-use system — have been cleared from the 1960s to the 1980s, their extent has remained relatively stable since.
This is a positive and surprising trend, especially as the Common Agricultural Policy provides little support to high nature value farming systems. Instead, it is possibly caused by more conservation-oriented land management, but probably also by land abandonment and the accompanying reduction of disturbances. Strict legal action through the EU Habitats and Birds Directives, development of agri-environmental schemes, LIFE+, and other funding programs, as well as information campaigns have contributed to this success.
Such rare stories of conservation success should be shared and celebrated much more widely.
But conservation is an ever-lasting battle, and new threats (e.g. from the application of veterinary drugs) are constantly evolving.
While there is high awareness for conserving nature, the value of cultural heritage remains widely ignored in Extremadura.
Everyday features of traditional land use, for instance, stonewalls, livestock drove roads, dry stone terraces, traditional irrigation systems, or old farm buildings are until today frequently destroyed or ignored and abandoned at best.
Heritage-led social innovation is a big topic in the EU and has considerable potential for strengthening regional identity, fostering participation, improving well-being, creating jobs, and maintaining landscape values.
But in Extremadura, capitalizing on cultural heritage (also outside the historical urban centres of the region, many of which are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage sites) as a catalyst for environmental, social, and economic rural development has clearly not yet been achieved.
“Developmentalism” has long shaped the mindset of regional developers in Extremadura, but has brought little useful development to the area.
An oil refinery, huge irrigation dams, vast plantations of fast-growing trees, even a nuclear power plant — the empty landscapes, vast distances, and the prevailing patterns of large private land ownership may explain a tendency toward technocratic, large-scale, top-down planned developments. Most recently, large-scale photovoltaics project and development of motorway and high-speed train networks have massively altered rural landscapes.
Over decades, new roads have been framed as the panacea of rural development: Once they are built, all the rest (industry, tourists, jobs) will come by itself.
The reality is that socioeconomic benefits to rural communities have mostly been very limited, as the profits were mainly realized by developers outside the region, while the environmental damage has often been large.
Governments and administrations have played an ambivalent role in rural development.
While substantial funds have been provided for all sorts of development, the mindsets of policymakers, but even more of civil servants, are often not ready to support innovation in rural development.
For example, a coalition of researchers, land users, and local residents are calling and acting for paradigmatic changes in the way how wildfires are managed:
The idea is to create fire-resistant landscapes in which a mosaic of multifunctional land uses — e.g., pastoralism, olive cultivation, agroforestry — naturally prevents that wildfires become catastrophic.
It slowly develops into mainstream thinking in the area. But due to convenience, path dependencies, vested interests, fear of committing an error, and other reasons, public administrations are stuck in their conventional, expensive approaches to eradicating wildfires with large machinery, airplanes, and fire breaks — leaving it to the commitment of citizens, NGOs, universities, and other bridging organisations to foster transformative change in wildfire management.
The Extremadura case shows how hard rural development can be (even if funds are available) when the administrative system is not ready to embrace innovations in governance.
Where does this brief perspective on (almost) three decades of rural development leave us?
Extremadura is a fascinating region, and I am impressed how it managed to preserve its natural treasures and how some socioeconomic progress has been made — despite many follies of “developmentalism”.
The EU recently released a long-term vision for rural areas toward 2040. The case of Extremadura highlights that creating “strong, connected, resilient, and prosperous rural areas” is a multi-decade task; it requires much stronger appreciation of the endogenous values of a region, and a critical stance to externally driven, large-scale development models.
In my view, rural development has been too much driven in a top-down fashion, and it has ignored the perceptions, capabilities, and aspirations of civil society.
Local people have frequently initiated their own development projects, e.g., in rural tourism or local food production. These efforts, however, have remained scattered across places and sectors.
Integrated landscape management can provide tools and pathways to coordinate these projects and work toward an integrated rural vision for Extremadura.
