Pursuing Integration Between Rural Development Policies and Landscape Planning: Towards a Territorial Governance Approach

Landscape planning and Rural Development Programmes (RDP) share common objectives of preservation and improvement of the rural landscape, so a deeper integration between these two domains would deliver significant benefits towards sustainable development. However, until now they have developed largely independently as both research fields and policy sectors. This chapter addresses the main theoretical issues concerning the advocated potential integration by first identifying and discussing two different rationales underlying landscape and rural development policies, namely a territorial and a sectoral one. Subsequently, a case study regarding the Territorial Plan of the Province of Turin, Italy, is presented to illustrate how landscape/spatial planning and RDP’s policies and objectives can converge and the different regulations and capacities of these instruments used to deliver mutual benefits. In particular, it is shown how the design and implementation of Agri-environmental schemes within RDP could be made more effective and spatially targeted by taking into account the spatial analysis and landscape areas designation elaborated by the Territorial Plan. It is argued that to foster synergies, a shift towards a territorial governance approach in RDP design and implementation is needed, which entails a deeper horizontal and vertical coordination between government levels and sectors, as well as the involvement of stakeholder from the civil society in the design and realization of territorialized projects. The discussion is framed in the ongoing debate on the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy in the period 2014–2020.