Landscape and democracy: contemporary forms of participatory democracy applied to landscape

Landscape Dimensions - Reflections and proposals for the implementation of the European Landscape Convention

Yves Luginbühl, April 2017

1 - Diverse and sometimes spontaneous experiences

Participatory experiences involving landscape emerged in the 1990s and developed after this decade. They accompanied social movements that appeared in Europe around problems of quality of life threatened by facilities or developments deemed contrary to the well-being of the populations concerned. In France, work carried out in the Côtes d’Armor region has made it possible to identify one of these spontaneous experiences which took place in a small catchment area: the Mission d’initiative rurale, a local association, organised a demonstration on the problem of water quality degraded by the spreading of liquid manure from livestock farms; it invited the inhabitants of the communes bordering the river in question to a festival on its banks. After the festival, the participants went for a walk along the river and were asked to observe the existing hedges, the locations of old hedges that had been cut down and those where it would be important to replant them ; the farmers present discussed and more or less agreed with the observations made.

After the festival, the association began to make proposals for the replanting of hedges by convincing the farmers to participate. Its action took the form of a festive event where the debate took place in a convivial manner and the result was the replanting of hedges discussed in common ; since then, the association has provided farmers with aerial photographs of their farms with the layout of the hedges, which they can thus follow the evolution. These movements are close to the experiments that the social sciences attempted in the same years, inspired by spontaneous actions born in contexts of opposition to political decisions. During work carried out in the Dordogne valley in 1993, landscape workshops were organised from the same perspective as Mairie-conseils. They followed a vast study of the landscapes of the Dordogne valley, which had a scientific experimental dimension by carrying out a survey of the 284 communes of the valley to identify the landscapes of local interest, the transformations perceived locally and the individual and collective, public and private projects known in each commune; these elements were mapped on a scale of 1:25,000, and it was on this basis that the « landscape workshops » took place with the elected representatives, the technicians of the administrations concerned and the inhabitants. This experience was reported in the conclusions of the first workshops of the European Landscape Convention, held in Strasbourg. We will only draw the essential lessons from them.

These workshops began with a collective visit to the chosen territory (five municipalities representing approximately the space of a landscape unit), during which the participants could exchange their knowledge of landscape transformations in situ by commenting on them. They were followed by workshops in the room, allowing the formalization of the state of affairs on the maps previously established by the survey : each participant was invited to add his or her own additions to the maps. The maps were modified and validated at the next meeting ; this is an important step that seals the recognition of a document taking on the status of a body of shared knowledge. The negotiation process around a collective development project was based on the exchange and sharing of information, starting from a common concern : the quality of the river water worried the elected representatives, due to the decision of the Public Health Administration to close down a 2,000-place campsite following the presence of bacteria dangerous to the health of bathers. Without going into the details of the meetings, it is important to stress the importance of starting the negotiation process on a concrete fact that makes sense for the community and on which it is then possible to explain the various urban, ecological and agricultural consequences of this issue of water quality, such as the high cost of the drinking water supply network if the houses are scattered, for example. This debate thus amounts to a gradual reconstitution of the landscape of the portion of the valley concerned and the assembly recognises the need to control the territory by planning documents or by specific measures, but respecting the globality of the territory. Each person contributed ideas to remedy the problems they had identified together and gradually a collective project was developed that could be considered a landscape project. The lessons learned from this experience are the following :

• the collective reading of the landscape is an important step which has been reproduced elsewhere and which confirms its effectiveness ;

• the second point is the cartography : it allows each participant to locate important local landscapes, transformations and projects, while sharing this knowledge through the debate with the other inhabitants ;

• thirdly, the process of developing the project on the basis of shared knowledge, which is built up step by step, through the mutual contribution of solutions from the various actors present, including the elected representatives. But one of the problems of this process is its continuity. In the absence of funding to go further, the process stops and there is no way to ensure that all the measures devised during the discussions are implemented. This is a real obstacle, which is not removed as long as the funds allocated to these experiments by the local authorities are limited in time; moreover, a change of elected official can never be ruled out and casts doubt on the continuation of the operation.

In any case, this type of participative approach brings valuable lessons for the contribution of the populations to the collective experience of elaboration of a landscape project in the framework of democracy.

2 - From contestation to project

In Italy, Mauro Varotto and Ludovico Visentin (2008) have analysed such movements, which are appearing in the Veneto region: they have drawn up a map of the committees (comitati) that have been formed to fight against new installations of contested facilities ; these committees, which numbered 108 in 2000, were divided into two categories :

• those that have an approach of contesting the installation of landfills, infrastructures, television or telephone relay antennas, quarries or incinerators, in particular ;

• those who are more oriented towards the development of landscape planning projects.

The two Italian geographers note that this second category has developed at the expense of the first. In a decade, the committees have gone from protest to proposal, and their number now reaches 253. In addition, they have become more spatially based, moving to a supralocal scale or organising themselves on a regional scale by contacting each other through social networks, thus forming more powerful groupings in the face of local and regional administrations. By organising at a lower scale, they have also changed their meaning, moving towards organisations with a civic purpose or the defence of grassroots democracy :

«  (…) their desire for environmental quality, civic awareness, social justice and sustainability of economic development processes constitutes the cultural challenge of the new respect for the civic environment.  » (Varotto and Visentin, 2008).

« In many cases, the protest of the committees is transformed into a political proposal, structuring it into a broader project of alternative territorial development, which intervenes in the commissions to orient the administration of territorial planning » (Varotto and Visentin, 2008:6).

This evolution is also noted by Pierre Rosanvallon, who points out that ‘ in the 1960s and 1970s, the reference to participatory democracy was made by social movements that demanded a new distribution of power (…) The issue is no longer the same at the beginning of the 20th century’ (Rosanvallon, 2008). According to him, governments need these alternative movements, which fulfil a role in transmitting information or in unblocking controversial situations. However, by stating that they are ‘ almost always set up by governments themselves ', Rosanvallon omits spontaneous movements that do not originate from the political or scientific world, and in particular from the social sciences, but appear on the occasion of a conflict situation or a problem posed to society on a given scale, such as the Venetian committees, thus innovating in the relationship between landscape and democracy. They are part of the group of alternative associations that are springing up everywhere. Their particularity lies in the use of landscape as a support for civic claims for the improvement of the living environment, combining the desire for greater social justice with the demand for sustainable development and the recognition of the emotional and aesthetic values of the territory in which they emerge. Numerous examples could be mentioned. What can be retained from these lessons is undoubtedly the diversity of democratic forms of participation linked to landscape. But also the obvious progression of the passage from contestation to project which, more and more, takes the appearance of a continuous process, although the political and financial conditions of its implementation do not always allow it. The factors of success or failure of these experiments whose approaches have evolved since their appearance on the social scene will now be examined.

CONCLUSION

The democracy/landscape relationship is a complex area that depends on multiple factors belonging to many fields of meaning. Experiences exist everywhere, both in Europe and in other states of the world, but they do not apply in the same way at the international, European, national, regional and local levels. It seems clear that the local level is the one that best meets the desire to be dependent on processes that are difficult for people to control. Moreover, the draft Constitutional Treaty of the European Union, proposed in 2004, distinguishing participatory democracy from representative democracy, saw it as a means of « open, transparent and regular dialogue with associations representing civil society ». Even though this treaty was not adopted because several states voted against it. The desire for participation is nonetheless relatively strong in European societies. Among these factors, the very meaning of the term « landscape », which is not always identical in the States of Europe, but which has been defined with the consent of the vast majority of European States through the ratification of the European Landscape Convention, interacts with the scales of action and the status of the actors mobilised. In Europe, as in other continents, the desire of the populations to be listened to by the political world, which often seems outdated when it comes to dealing with the major global processes of commercial and financial exchange, is becoming apparent. Participation is becoming a democratic exercise demanded by many social movements, such as the « Indignant » or the World Social Forum, which are nevertheless struggling to make their voices heard. Several avenues of reflection are already proving to be relevant in order to continue the commitment to the implementation of a democracy that allows the question of the living environment, the landscape of people’s daily lives, to be addressed. But, more generally, it is essential to develop reflection on interaction or deliberative democracy by promoting research in the social and ecological sciences, which are already involved in this theme, but which are insufficiently supported by research funding, which has been significantly reduced in recent years due to the crisis and the need to reduce public deficits.

The exercise of democracy cannot escape the complexity of the processes of production and transformation of landscapes, for which a social mobilisation on a European scale was born with the European Landscape Convention. Landscape itself is a « complex » of material and immaterial meanings that science has separated and thus reduced, to the point of making landscape action difficult, whereas it offers potentialities commensurate with the hopes that its supporters have for it:

«  (…) science has become blind in its inability to control, foresee, even conceive its social role, in its inability to integrate, articulate, reflect its own knowledge. If indeed the human mind cannot apprehend the enormous body of disciplinary knowledge, then either the human mind or the disciplined knowledge must be changed » (Morin, 2005:106).

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