ABSTRACT
Land use conflicts, especially conflicts surrounding agricultural land preservation, are the focus of much public debate at the state and local levels of government. This chapter examines market and political incentives established by Wisconsin's Farmland Preservation Law (FPL) and reviews a range of policy options from which the FPL was formed. The options discussed include financial incentives to land owners, such as use value assessment, and public regulation—strict zoning, for example. Effects on the behavior of specific interest groups are reviewed. We learn that small changes in the institutional rules-of-the-game for a natural resource/ environmental issue can have significant effects on the substantive policy outcomes—that is, who gets what.
