ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a research which has the objective of making a link between the application of GIS in supporting land-use policy decisions and a developing body of literature on farm response to external change, primarily contributed by agricultural economics and rural sociology. The primary research interest was in modelling the consequences of agricultural and rural land-use policy. The chapter illustrates farm response to change in the external environment in terms of a set of socio-economic and behavioural ‘filters’. Farm change is a highly complex function of spatially and temporally variable factors, combined with the personal, family and business characteristics of individual farmers and land managers. The chapter shows that it is possible to construct more complex models of landowner and land-user behaviour which will yield a more accurate picture of the consequences of shifts in decision-makers’ external environments.
