Landscape and Life: Appropriate Scales for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Defining sustainable development as the challenge of continuously balancing economic, social and ecological values, a European research project sought lessons from experiences of a forty-year period to frame criteria of appropriate scale for contextually-sensitive environmental policy. A network of case studies conducted by partner teams in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden examined changes of scale in the territorial, functional and socio-political contexts of life and landscape between 1950-1990. Themes central to the project included landscape transformations, tensions among area- and sector-based ways of life (genres tie vie), and changing horizons of discretionary reach. With illustrations drawn mainly from the Irish case studies in Tipperary, this paper describes some regional differences in response to external—policy and market-driven—influences. Implications for cross-cultural research and the framing of contextually-sensitive environmental policy are outlined, and suggestions made for their modulation through European Union, national, regional, and local levels.