Fostering transitions in landscape policies: A multi-level perspective

At the beginning of the new century, the European Landscape Convention (ELC) marked a paradigm shift in the conception of landscape, which now includes not only outstanding places but also everyday and even degraded landscapes as important to people’s lives and identity. This requires competent authorities to define appropriate landscape policies to foster protection, management and planning of landscapes. A challenge is thus to find new approaches and tools to make the new concept translated into practice. This is particularly complex in countries like Italy, where landscape policies have been exclusively focused on protection through rigid zoning landscape plans. The case of the Apulia region, which is analysed in the paper, is of particular significance, as it started a radical process of transition in landscape policies few years after the approval of a very rigid regional landscape plan. The region was then the first one in Italy to approve, in 2015, a regional Territorial Landscape Plan (TLP) in line with the ELC. The paper analyses the transition pathway undertaken in the region. A particular attention is paid to the way innovative forms of landscape management and planning have been mobilized, supported and given long-term perspectives, while resistance to change have been lowered throughout the development and the implementation of the new TLP, thanks to a wide range of policy instrument mixes envisaged by the regional government. The Multi Level Perspective (MLP) is used for the analysis, due to its capacity to show the nested and bi-directional dynamics of change across multiple levels and the interactions between different sectors/actors.