Landscape management decisions and public-policy interventions

Landscapes change through a combination of natural and social processes. In agricultural landscapes, decisions on landscape structures and functions - here termed landscape management decisions - play a fundamental role with the farmers as the key actors. As producers of food and fibre and as owners of properties, farmers develop their holdings according to their interpretation of new constraints and new options (Van der Ploeg 1994; Shucksmith 1993). Whereas there is a fast growing body of literature on the changing agricultural landscapes, there is still a poor understanding of farmers' decision-making in a policy context. This is somewhat paradoxical, since a common aim of landscape-ecological studies of agricultural landscapes is to improve the policy-making process (Moss 2000; Wiens 1999). The relationship between farmers' landscape management decisions, landscape change, and public policies is the subject of this paper. First, the relationship is analysed in respect to the main driving forces with emphasis on different types of policy interventions, farmers' decisions and agricultural regions. Next, we present - in some detail - examples from recent studies of landscape changes in different Danish agricultural regions, and finally, we discuss some implications of these empirical examples for the design and implementation of landscape policies.