ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the potential of landesque capital to serve as a unifying concept in interdisciplinary research into land change in a broad sense and in resilience and sustainability studies in general. It proposes an integrative framework for analyzing improvements in land capability, based on the concept of landesque capital and its specific application to agricultural landscapes. The chapter argues, an opportunity for a productive articulation of how biophysical and societal processes interact to enhance land capability. It suggests that one way of imparting analytical clarity to the landesque capital concept is to avoid conceptualizing it as purely human-made capital or as "embanked" labor, but instead to approach it as a relative measure of the productive capacity of investments in a landscape. The chapter argues that a reversal of Blaikie and Brookfield's framework for analyzing land degradation, coupled with their original definition, provides an appropriate basis for a greener conceptualization of landesque capital formation.
