Developing comprehensive indicators for monitoring rural policy impacts on landscape in Alentejo, southern Portugal

Abstract

In recent decades, rural Europe has experienced major transitions, impelled by multiple drivers at varying scales, leading to increasingly differentiated modes of rural occupance. There is a need to monitor the multiple forces driving these transitions, so as to ensure that rural support and development policies are well targeted. In this paper, we develop a methodology which recognizes and regionalizes the three dimensions underlying rural multifunctionality, namely production, consumption and protection as initially conceptualized by Holmes (2006, 2012). In our approach, these three dimensions are linked to socio-economic dynamics, which vary across space and may act as a stimulus or a constraint on the multifunctional transition. For the municipalities in Alentejo, southern Portugal, we construct an appropriate set of indicators for conveying the four (production, protection, consumption and socio-economic) dimensions studied. Results show that with a robust set of spatial indicators the different dimensions by Holmes were gauged across the case study area. Further, results also highlight the advantages of crosschecking the production, protection and consumption dimensions with a fourth socio-economic dimension in order to comprehsively explore the possible ways in wich policy targetting can be made. This method can be a valuable tool to inform policy targetting and decision-making, including those of potential investors. Future research pathways are delineated in order to refine the employed indicator set and to include other possible dimensions and analytical techniques into this innovative methodological framework.

Keywords:

• multifunctionality
• spatially explicit indicators
• transitions
• rural dynamics
• rural policy
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Professor John Holmes both for inspiring the work here developed and for his work on editing and improving the English of the paper. Acknowledgements are also due to the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) for the funding provided to the post doc scholarship of the leading author of the paper with the reference SFRH/BPD/69329/2010. This work is funded by FEDER Funds through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors – COMPETE and National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology under the Strategic Project PEst-C/AGR/UI0115/2011.