Towards an European research agenda on estimating landscape preferences
Résumé
Landscape perception embraces the relations that people entertain with their societal and natural environments. This relationship mirrors the different social representations, but also the expectations of modern societies to overcome the limits of public landscape policies. Human cultures and landscapes co-evolve but both are subject to exogenous drivers too: the main difficulties that landscape economics faces is to distinguish all of these drivers in order to provide quantitative assessments of their impacts. Usually, economics gets into landscape through three main sets of concepts. The definition provided by the European Landscape Convention leads the economist to analyse the social demand for landscape, using concepts from public economics, together with an analysis of landscape supply using the latest work in geographical economics, and insights from the study of property rights. Of course, it is not possible to settle for these approaches and we need to also mobilise public goods concepts and to consider that landscape supply results from a joint provision by multiple actors. How can these concepts be grouped together to transcend the simple use of old ideas to describe a new object?