« Landscape Economics: the Road ahead »

The aims of this paper are to delineate some important topics in landscape economics, and also to put landscape policy in the perspective of the sustainable development. The research issue is about the relationships between the development paths and landscape changes, paved with examples of consensus, controversies, and conflicts. Landscape is a polysemic term, many approaches and definitions exist for it, and as a consequence, economists should adopt or elaborate their own landscape definition or concept (the most suitable to their general methodology, and related to their most familiar concepts). Landscape appears to be a local public good. That definition correspond to the property rights market failure arising from the co-visibility. Co-visibility makes it difficult in general to identify precisely the link between each owner action and the agregate landscape outcome. As a consequence, landscape ownership appears to be scattered into a multiplicity of actors of various nature (individual, communal, statal…). How to exploit that analogy with non point source pollution is a challenge for landscape economics research. Each actor has his own objective and management criteria, either for agricultural, forestry, industrial or residential activities. Moreover, there are multiple public policie