Suchergebnisse

Agricultural landscapes are the product of the interaction of the natural environment of an area and the practices of its farmers. In this paper, farmers' practices are examined in order to describe and understand processes of landscape change in terraced fields on the island of Lesvos, Greece. We examine the changes of the terraced fields of each farmer and the reasons for these changes, practices concerning the maintenance of terraces and how farmers view this landscape change. The concept of farming systems is used to link farmers' practices at the farm level with changes at the landscape level. Data come from research via questionnaires to farmers in order to record their practices, to explore changes in land use and the landscape elements and the reasons behind these changes, and finally to record their opinions on the landscape change that result. Findings indicate that although farm households in the case study areas depend on farming incomes by very different degrees, they employ similar cultivation and landscape management practices. At the same time, "hobby" farm households may be more prone to abandonment of fields and negligence of landscape elements (here terraces).

In this paper, we seek to shed light on issues related to satisfaction with government institutions and personal quality of life from living on an island, teasing out common themes to determine whether there is a shared identity among islanders, regardless of geography, level of development and size, as it relates to governance. We explore these qualities in six different groups of island residents across ten islands or archipelagos, ranging in size, location and governance features. Half are sovereign states and the rest are subnational island jurisdictions: Tobago (Trinidad & Tobago), Grenada, Prince Edward Island (Canada), St. Lucia, Lesvos (Greece), Cyprus, Newfoundland (Canada), Iceland, Reunion (France) and Mauritius. Using a Likert-type questionnaire, island participants were asked about the factors that constitute "quality of life" on their islands, with a particular focus on governance. The construction of composite indicators from survey questions and cluster analysis allows us to compare the attitudes within and between different groups of islands and stakeholder groups. Results suggest that, despite significant contextual variances among stakeholders and island locations and situations, some common threads run through all groups and all islands, related to the group the respondents were classified in. These threads comprise a rough basis for a deeper understanding of island identities. ; peer-reviewed

The concept of landscape has been increasingly used, in the last decades, in policy and land use planning, both in regard to so-called "special" and to "ordinary" or "everyday" landscapes. This has raised the importance of local and public participation in all issues that refer to landscapes and the definition of the groups that "have a stake" in the landscape. In this paper, we provide insights into how stakeholders perceive the dynamics of local processes of landscape change (and continuity) and which processes of landscape change they perceive as important, in positive and negative ways, from five communities within the European Union. These landscapes involve different landscape issues "at stake", different national and local planning and decision-making traditions and practices, and varying degrees of engagement. The understanding of these complexities and the unraveling of the insights is done through the concept of social capital and its different forms. We report on three series of workshops that have been organized to discuss landscape issues and approaches or ideas for landscape management. We witnessed interactions between the different stakeholders and gained insights into how social capital affects landscape change. We found that despite differences, similarities emerged concerning the interplay between "expert" and "local" knowledge and between "insideness" and "outsideness". Social capital plays an important part, as it provides the template for personal and collective evaluation of landscape changes, who should manage these changes and how they should be managed. These findings are important to develop in-depth insights on dynamics and values of cultural landscapes and visions for re-coupling social and ecological components in cultural landscapes and translate them into policy and management options.