Participatory landscape sustainability assessment: where do we stand? A systematic literature review

Abstract

Context In line with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary principles of Sustainability Science, Participatory Landscape Sustainability Assessment (PLSA) studies are developing. These studies make the paradoxical promises to standardize observations to obtain robust and comparable data, while including a diversity of case studies, stakeholders and viewpoints. Objective The purpose of this paper is to highlight the diversity of perspectives on PLSA, arguing that the lack of coherent framing and a poor substantive theorization can limit the development of PLSA studies. Methods We conducted a systematic literature review on a corpus of 425 publications by combining bibliographic mapping on the full corpus and a content analysis on a sub-corpus of 138 full-texts. Results Our results showed that (i) this field is at the crossroads between ecology, landscape planning and sociocultural approaches, (ii) indicators combine on average 4.7 categories of sustainability, but are most applied at a local level and in a snapshot perspective, (iii) stakeholders are rarely involved in the choice of indicators (28.9% of studies) or in the assessment design (7.2%), and are mostly only asked to populate pre-identified indicators (63.9%), and (iv) viewpoint diversity is taken into consideration mainly by using indicators (67.3%) rather than by promoting deliberation (39.8%). In sum, we distinguish the participation-oriented approach, the contributive approach (anchored in positivism) and the collaborative approach (anchored in constructivism). Conclusion We advocate that future studies should be more explicit on the perspective they adopt in order to improve consistence between PLSA objectives, methods, and theoretical anchorages. This clarification might ultimately avoid confusion about the different regimes of participation and their respective contributions to Landscape Sustainability Science.

Sustainability assessment of rural landscapes from spatial and multiple stakeholders’ perspective

“…Perspectives of villagers. Based on a review of the rural sustainability assessments (Table 1) and considering the availability of data at the administrative village level, we conceived a multi-dimensional indicator system (Table 3) that embraced the perspectives of villagers, tourists, and the government, who are the key actors and stakeholders in rural development and sustainability (He et al 2020;Moreau et al 2023). More specifically, from the villagers' perspective, indicators of population density and population growth were selected from the social dimension (Ferretti et al 2020;González-García et al 2019;López-Penabad et al 2022;Martínez-Vega et al 2020).…”

“…Rural landscape, due to its multifunctionality, has become an arena for conflicts of interest (Carreño et al 2012;Laterra et al 2012;Nowak and Grunewald 2018). Recent studies of sustainability have increasingly emphasized the engagement of multi-stakeholders (Calderon and Butler 2019;Lang et al 2012;Moreau et al 2023), and the sustainability assessment is meant to integrate multiple stakeholders with distinct values and priorities (Cebrián-Piqueras et al 2017;Dale et al 2019). Specifically, in the context of urban-rural integration in China, the rural areas need to meet the needs of rural and urban residents.…”