Transitions in European land-management regimes between 1800 and 2010

By M. Jepsen, Tobias Kuemmerle, Daniel Müller, K. Erb, Peter H. Verburg, H. Haberl, Jens Peter Vesterager, M. Andrič, Marc Antrop, Gunnar Austrheim and 37 more. 2015

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Land use is a cornerstone of human civilization, but also intrinsically linked to many global sustainability challenges—from climate change to food security to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Understanding the underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers of land-use change, and how they play out in different environmental, socio-economic and cultural contexts, is therefore important for identifying effective policies to successfully address these challenges. In this regard, much can be learned from studying long-term land-use change. We examined the evolution of European land management over the past 200 years with the aim of identifying (1) key episodes of changes in land management, and (2) their underlying technological, institutional and economic drivers. To do so, we generated narratives elaborating on the drivers of land use-change at the country level for 28 countries in Europe. We qualitatively grouped drivers into land-management regimes, and compared changes in management regimes across Europe. Our results allowed discerning seven land-management regimes, and highlighted marked heterogeneity regarding the types of management regimes occurring in a particular country, the timing and prevalence of regimes, and the conditions that result in observed bifurcations. However, we also found strong similarities across countries in the timing of certain land-management regime shifts, often in relation to institutional reforms (e.g., changes in EU agrarian policies or the emergence and collapse of the Soviet land management paradigm) or to technological innovations (e.g., drainage pipes, tillage and harvesting machinery, motorization, and synthetic fertilizers). Land reforms frequently triggered changes in land management, and the location and timing of reforms had substantial impacts on land-use outcomes. Finally, forest protection policies and voluntary cooperatives were important drivers of land-management changes. Overall, our results demonstrate that land-system changes should not be conceived as unidirectional developments following predefined trajectories, but rather as path-dependent processes that may be affected by various drivers, including sudden events.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/104ac5854a4dec1c46324b83d7df713545d129cf

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Citations in the corpus

Hotspots of land use change in Europe (2016, methodology): “…statistics suggesting an increasing concentration of agriculture in suitable areas, sometimes occurring next to areas characterized by disintensification and abandonment (Robinson and Sutherland 2002, Stoate et al 2009, Piquer-Rodríguez et al 2012, Vanwambeke et al 2012, Jepsen et al 2015).”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “, 2017), as well as on how human-mediated ecological processes such as fire, nutrient cycling, grazing, and water flows regulate regime shifts (Gordon et al., 2008; Bestelmeyer et al., 2015; Jepsen et al., 2015; Rocha et al., 2015).”