ABSTRACT
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and more generally ‘the European Model of Agriculture’, that is agriculture functioning within a family economy which often includes non-farming functions and incomes (Deybe, 2007; Potter, 2004 ), call for a change in focus from an agro-sectoral to a territorial approach (Lowe et al, 2002; Mander et al, 2007; Wiggering et al, 2006). With this perspective, multifunctionality, more than an attribute of agriculture, may be analysed and understood in a more encompassing way as a complex attribute of rural space. This is rooted in a reinterpretation of agriculture’s contribution to rural development, and it is open to a broader community of stakeholders than agricultural producers only. But consequently there is a potential dilemma – in the design of empirical analysis and in public policy interventions of various kinds – between the farm level as the primary setting for decisions on land use and the landscape level at which the primary ecological, cultural and aesthetic functions are framed and where strategies for possible integrations should be decided. This landscape level includes the local area as it is perceived by people and formed over time in a mixture of cultural and natural processes, to use the definition of landscape in the European Landscape Convention (Council of Europe, 2000), as well as the spatial (the physical pattern of the area and its relationship to surrounding landscapes) and territorial (individual and social
control of the area) dimensions of this area. Mostly, European rural landscapes are shaped by farming, adapting and transforming the natural biophysical conditions through time, and having the farm as the basis for everyday decision making concerning production, as well as property management (Primdahl, 1999). Farming creates and maintains the patterns and elements in the landscape. But the natural biophysical properties are still the determinant for most landscape features, and therefore also have a role in the display of functions. The same can be said for the socio-cultural context which, besides farming activities and infrastructures, plays a framing and a dynamic role to most functions. Furthermore, intangible factors such as cultural, mental and attitudinal changes, which are seldom considered in analysis and in literature, are also required in order to progress towards multifunctionality (Wilson, 2007).
