ABSTRACT
Introduction Throughout the world, in parallel discussions, communities are reflecting on the relative value of different characteristics of landscapes and pondering alternative future landscapes. Central to these discussions is recognizing various externalities related to land use and management and designing policies to internalize these forces. Various programs designed to protect working landscapes, such as subsidies, direct payments, land acquisition and property tax relief, are justified as a means to compensate private, working landowners for public services they provide but are not compensated for by the market, such as biodiversity, habitat and scenic views. In addition to these programs focused on positive externalities, a suite of policies exists to diminish the negative externalities of working lands, such as odors and pollution. This latter set of programs encourages private, “working” landowners to recognize the full costs of their actions. An improved comprehension of public preferences for protecting working landscapes is arguably central to understanding and managing these external effects. This chapter begins with a brief transatlantic comparison of agri-environmental programs in the European Union and the United States. The objective of this comparison is to identify similarities and distinctions as well as to consider potential drivers of variation in these programs. The remainder of the chapter summarizes an empirical case study of public preferences for protecting working landscapes using data from Maine, giving emphasis to variation in preferences on the local scale. This study contrasts recent voting results on two ballot initiatives related to landscape protection in Maine. A set of reduced-form discrete-choice models of the voting outcomes is estimated using community-scale data, where the proportion of voter support for an initiative is explained as a function of demographic, landscape, location, employment and political characteristics.
