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Simplification of approval procedures to start works for land improvement and re-cultivate wasteland
Simplification of licensing procedures for small processing activities of local products
3.Efficiency
Farming profitability
Encourage interactions among operators (farmers, producers, associations, tour-operators, traders, schools and alike)
Certification of products
Designation of origin (DOC, DOP, IGP, Subzone) Brand
Introduction of value-added crops Local processing of primary products
4.Facilities and infrastructures
Infrastructural provision (roads, accessibility, irrigation, drainage and alike)
5.Public-private partnership: funding and taxation
Project and implementation partnership (co-financing) between public and private to attain sustainable performances
Direct funding (see, for instance, the Japanese model) Tax benefits
Design and implementation of a project portfolio through programs or strategic plans combining incentives (for environment, landscape and heritage) and direct funding
6.Governance
Pro-active role of local authorities
Enhancement of the participation of local communities and associations Planning-policies interactions
International cooperation for the exchange of good practices (ITLA, Slow Food and alike)
References
Alves G, Pedro J (2009) The artificial simulacrum world. The geopolitical elimination of communitary land use and its effects on our present global condition. Eloquent Books
Costanza R et al (1997) The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 387:253–260
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Diamond J (2005) Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. Viking Press, New York Mang P, Haggard B, Regenesis Group (2016) Regenerative development and design. A framework
for evolving sustainability. Wiley
Martins EO (2016) Ecosystems, strong sustainability and the classical circular economy. Ecol Econ 129:32–39
Weitzman ML (2000) Economic profitability versus ecological entropy. Quart J Econ 115(1): 237–263
Chapter 21
Integrated Policies for Terraces:
The Role of Landscape Observatories
Anna Marson
Abstract So far, we do not have a systematic evidence about the effectiveness of single policies, nor of their different combinations applied in diverse contexts for safeguarding and bringing into new life terraced landscapes. We just know that policies that are more diffuse include regulations about how terraced landscapes should be preserved and restored, and some financial compensative measures in the frame of agricultural policies. From an academic point of view, if we consider, according to Lowi (1972), the four types of policies usually employed (distributive, redistributive, regulatory and constituent), it becomes quite clear that successful policies need a sensible combination of these different “resources”. Just as an example: a restriction (like a rule about how to restore terraces) is more easily accepted if combined with some kind of benefit (financial, but also of other nature) and will have an easier implementation if the diverse institutions share it. However, such an approach is seldom practised, since terraced landscapes do not represent a sectoral interest, and no financial or economic lobby pushes for redirecting public policies towards effectiveness in preserving this collective heritage. In such a general context, local landscape observatories represent a new and great resource, since they are reframing the issue from below, adopting de facto an integrated point of view and a collective interest. In Italy, many of them have done an important job in raising consciousness about terraced landscapes heritage value, but also acting directly for repairing them, for preventing abandonment, for promoting new sustainable agriculture, for spreading good practices. After an introduction dealing with policies for terraced landscapes, the paper will therefore explore, with reference mainly to Italy, what landscape observatories are, how they work both on a voluntary or institutional base, how they are helping to reframe the terraced landscapes preservation issue, looking into new ways to reconcile economy and landscape.
A. Marson (&)
IUAV University Venice, Venice, Italy e-mail: anna.marson@iuav.it
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21.1About Policies: Why Current Ones Do not Work?
In Italy, as well as for a large extension of the Mediterranean region, the heritage of terraced landscapes is extremely diffuse and altogether little known. Generally, terraces are located in steep and therefore less “developed” areas, i.e. areas less transformed and often almost spared by twentieth-century modernization processes. They represent therefore a valuable cultural heritage, incorporating a lot of contextual knowledge about how to deal with nature in a sustainable (durable, i.e. lasting) way. At the same time, they are the result of human creation perhaps more than any other rural landscape, requiring continuous human work to survive, without which nature comes back but terraces will definitely die. As Magnaghi (2005, p. 62) writes
a terraced hill system is a living system, a highly complex ‘neo-ecosystem’ constantly evolving over time, produced through the constant work of construction, transformation and maintenance of the stone terraces, determining new and more complex balances between human action and nature: exposure to the sun, and the yield and fertility of the soil increase; water is controlled and channelled, microclimates and hydro-geological safeguards are created. This leads to special farming techniques and crops and therefore is an information, technical and cultural heritage. In short, an anthropic landscape is created.
If abandoned, however (in other words if it is not continually used, ‘nourished’, and cared for), the terracing is degraded and ultimately dies as a territory with its value as a heritage […]. The landscape thus reverts back to ‘nature’ through processes of washing away, erosion, subsidence, land caving in, larger landslides, and the growth of vegetation and wild woods with new fauna and so on until it reaches a new hydro-geological natural ‘climax’.
Regulatory policies alone, in the case of terraced landscapes do not work at all. As it happens usually for heritage in general, and more specifically for this peculiar landscape, the additional charges due to compliance with rules meant to protect it, without any compensation measure, bring most peasants or economic users to abandon cultivation and maintenance, or to avoid rules and transform, sometimes destroy, old terraces. Only in a few cases, agricultural enterprises succeed in creating benefits for their production thanks to the image of terraces, and therefore producing a self-incentive for maintaining and restoring them. Rules alone are not enough to protect terraced landscapes, if new productive uses, coherent with their characters, do not become the object of a specific focus, thanks also to public policies, to keep them alive.1
Since local and regional governments, nor to speak about national ones, often have a vague idea of how many terraces there are on their territories, or even about the fact that there are terraces on their territories2, public proactive policies for
1On this issue of giving back new productive uses to terraced landscapes, see, for instance, Baldeschi (2001).
2For the Regione Piemonte terraces, for instance, the only panel presented in the ITLA exhibition on terraced landscapes (Venice-Padua, October 2016) has been submitted by a local NGO, La prima langa. Osservatorio per il paesaggio delle valli Alta Bormida e Uzzone.
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maintaining or repairing terraces are seldom present. Also when existing, they do not happen to be the result of a proper policy design process.
This lack of institutional action is only partly counterbalanced by a number of pioneer initiatives, taken both by people moving to the countryside from metropolitan areas and by local young people, investing time, work and sometimes money to bring terraces back to specific cultivations, for which they are far better than normal terrains: vineyards, saffron, aromatic plants, etc. Moreover, by a number of efforts by civic associations, ecomuseums handcraft schools and analogous dedicated institutions to foster the knowledge and the maintenance of such a heritage.
At the same time, these many bottom-up initiatives to keep terraced landscapes alive would be much more effective if institutional policies were sympathetic and collaborative in fostering the maintenance of terraced landscapes with new and coherent forms of multifunctional life.
Looking outside Italy, some policies seem to be more robust,3 but in international literature it is not easy to find proper case studies, dealing in depth with the diverse policies developed in the different contexts.
A major issue, which appears quite evident from Italian experience, is anyhow the fact that policies tend to be sectorial, rather than integrated, with regulatory policies disjointed from other types of action.
In this sense, it may be useful to go back to Lowi (1972) classification, which identifies four types of policies: distributive, redistributive, regulatory and constituent.
Still used in policy analysis, although the latter has today often changed in «governance», this classification points out that rules are just one specific kind of policy, usually not sufficient to promote the minimum maintenance of terraced landscapes, even less to guarantee the multifunctional role traditionally performed by these carefully built landscapes.
In fact, the role of terraces in centuries (la longue durée) has been at least a triple one:
–slowing down hydrogeological dynamics;
–creating new fertile soil;
–bettering existing microclimate.
Not by chance, the Register of Historical Rural Landscapes, promoted by the Italian Ministry of “Politiche Agricole, Alimentari e Forestali” (Agnoletti 2010), refers to many terraced areas as rural landscapes with an important heritage value. In fact, terraced landscapes represent the result of good and useful practices selection, able to last in time. Today, we look at landscape no longer as just an aesthetical experience, but first of all as a structure produced by a number of
3Among many others, I would quote the action taken for the French Parc des Cevennes, the Suisse Domleschg project and even the Trento Landscape Observatory/STEP, an Italian case that so far represents a positive exception.
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positive relations: in this case, a successful and lasting synthesis of Vitruvious’ firmitas and utilitas (in multifunctional terms, of course), and therefore venustas.
Indeed, these terraced areas represent not only a rich depository of applied knowledge, but also great places for a diverse, wiser, development of human well-being, with specific reference to the so-called interior areas and the issue of re-inhabiting them (Barca 2015).
How do different policy’s types interact with this potential perspective? Distributive policies are usually the most easy and less conflictual policies,
although financial constraints growingly experienced by public institutions have reduced a lot the possibility to activate them. Moreover, contribution alone, to restore a terrace or something alike, usually does not produce a lasting or a replication effect, although it can help the maintenance of some terraces otherwise destroyed by natural processes or men action.
Redistributive policies are always more conflictual than distributive policies, but also easier to last in the medium-long term. There are not many examples applied to terraced landscapes, although they might define some interesting perspective. For instance, since terraces are hydrogeological devices, other landowner benefitting from them might be asked to pay a small tax, like those usual collected for drainage services.
Terraces also might be “redistributed”, since the municipalities might entrust the abandoned ones to people caring for them, taking them away from the absent or even unknown owners.4
Regulatory policies are usually highly conflictual, when not integrated with distributive or redistributive policies, compensating the burden of complying with more or less heavy rules. At the same time, since they do not require a direct financing capacity, when there are no other possibilities at hand for dealing with a critical issue, both civil society and institutions ask for or propose new rules. Because of the lacking integration with other measures, usually rules suffer an implementation deficit.
Constituent (governance) policies consist of setting up special institutions, like, for instance, institutional landscape observatories, but also building new collective actors, creating arenas able to bring forward plus than zero-sum games together with and for the community.
Practice is of course more messy, but successful policies are usually made by a sensible combination of different types of policies (distributive or redistributive, regulatory, constituent or governance). A restriction (like a rule about how to restore terraces) is more easily accepted if combined with some kind of benefit (financial, but also of other nature) and will have an easier implementation if a collective institution (in the wider term) shares it and takes proactive action besides it.
Unluckily, in most contexts, the scheme “protection” versus “no care at all” still prevails in public policies for terraced landscapes. In some regions, terraced
4In marginal areas, many rural plots of land are property of emigrated people, whose descendant have never visited or reclaimed the property, and are often unknown to local public institutions.
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landscapes are within protected area; this helps to avoid great alteration, but not dereliction (Cinque Terre5, Amalfi coast, etc.), despite the tourism interest for these coastal areas. On the other hand, in a larger number of places outside these areas, terraced landscapes are still undergoing rough destruction processes, in order to plant new hazel groves or vineyards or become the base for building new houses. No collective action to adapt tractors to places or to preserve the genius loci: owners are just looking for the most rentable function in the short term.
Of course financing matters too: the Suisse landscape Fond has 5,000,000 Sfr. a year for non-repayable incentives, while in Italy, we have only a few cases of some public (Fondo paesaggio Trentino), private (Fondo Ambiente Italiano) or private– public (Distretto Culturale Valtellinese) financing (but no national direct financing measures) for landscape. At the same time, no European Union policy in this field exists.6
What is even worst that no financing at all is having on the same territory both rules and incentives, but unrelated one to the other (like landscape rules and agriculture payments available for terraces, but without any «if, then» ratio; even worst landscape prescriptions and agricultural payments for modernization processes destroying terraces).
Anyhow, in many cases, there are no financial resources at all, and therefore discovering or even creating new resources is quite important. Useful action may include: new labelling and traceability for terrace products; promoting walking groups, artistic performers, voluntary groups, etc., for guaranteeing at least a minimal maintenance of terraces able to slow down their ruin; reframing the vision diverse local actors (from mayors to people working in forestry services; from local experts to school students) have about potentialities of terraced landscapes.
About reframing the vision, dry stone terraces can represent a limitation to agricultural modernization (the standard one) or as a resource for context-specific agricultural practices, less subject to concurrence than other agriculture productions. Similarly, spontaneous vegetation growing on terraces can be seen as a positive trend (by forestry service and by some ecologist) or as a very negative one, because it threatens terraces.7
To be effective in bringing derelict terraces a new life, policies should:
–approach preservation with a pragmatic approach open to sensitive innovation in techniques, materials and dimensions/shapes, bridging codified and local knowledge(s);
–ensure a specific labelling for terraces rural production (restricting it to existing terraces);
5A multidisciplinary work on potential new perspectives for Cinque Terre terraces in Besio (2002).
6This means that the implementation of instruments like the European Landscape Convention, promoted by the Council of Europe, is a national stuff, while EU policies pay no attention to these objectives.
7For instance, in some regions of Italy (like Liguria), the permit to cut vegetation on terraces is easy to obtain, in others (like Piedmont) much more difficult.