Social Participation, Institutional Change, and Land Property in the Building up of Sustainability: A Case Study of Land-Use Conflict in Tenerife (Canary Islands)

Abstract

This paper is grounded in VALSE (VALuation for Sustainable Environment) methodology, which seeks to understand the ways that concerned people express the ‘values’ of environment. In our research we aim to assess the importance of maintaining these values, and to test the integration of the valuation statements within a real decisionmaking process. The study of the combination of institutional analysis and democratic perspective in land-use conflict in the Canary Islands was used for such assessment and testing. An institutional analysis was carried out in order to account for recent changes in the notion of landownership (through the introduction of environmental and landscape values) and corresponding changes in the institutional framework. A democratic perspective was applied in order to include public expression, debate, and deliberation as valid ways of generating and exchanging knowledge, and as a means of reaching a satisfactory environmental decision. The problem of land use associated with the environmental valuation issue can be adequately understood by studying the social processes responsible for the different land uses. To think in terms of social processes for environmental valuation of the landscape implies concern over a process of collective understanding: the ways values and interests are formed and the way the conflict gives rise to different notions and rules of the game, and to different manners of conceiving and implementing decisionmaking processes and solutions to environmental problems.