Research Reports
A Study on Rural Landscape Management and Policy Directions
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AuthorSeong, Jooin
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Publication Date2005.12.01
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Original
Recently, the interest in rural amenities has been growing in Korea. They are considered as one of the most important local assets. The term "rural amenities" covers a wide range of countryside resources, and rural scenic landscape may be an essential part of it. So many local governments are trying to use their landscape resources in attracting tourists from outside the area and promoting the local economy. But in reality there are many institutional obstacles in making these efforts, and it is not easy to reduce the impact of various development projects, such as house constructions, road buildings, farming activities, and rural tourism developments, on the rural scenic beauty.
In this regard, the purpose of this study is to take a look at the current situation of rural landscape management in Korea, and to find out the problems of related policies, such as local or regional landscape management planning systems, land use control, designation of preservation areas, public participation programs, etc. And it is also designed to suggest desirable policy directions for rural landscape management.
Typical landscapes of countryside consist of various elements, which are in most cases classified into three main categories: agricultural production, everyday-living environment of villagers, and natural surroundings. And they are often regarded as public goods with externality.
While the concern is recently rising on the promotion of rural area development by using amenity resources, such as rural landscape features of certain locale, traditional functions of the countryside, such as agricultural production, often conflict with the consumption of scenic beauty, amenities, and cultural heritages. Therefore, landscape management policies are facing more tough questions than ever before. Many advanced countries in the West have deployed various policy programs, not limited to the restrictive means of policy, to address the complex situations of conserving, improving, and creating rural landscape simultaneously.
But until now rural landscape policies in Korea haven't had the chance to develop various kinds of programs aimed at promoting activities of cultivating rural landscapes and amenities by rural residents and stakeholders themselves. There may be a few local landscape management plans made by municipal governments or other local authorities, but the current situation is that many of them exist only on paper and their feasibility is very low. Local ordinances for the rural landscape management haven't been widely adopted until now. And in many cases, most of them haven't had any actual effect on local landscape management practices, while the sponsorship from various actors in the area is not available. Direct Payment Scheme to Landscaped Cropping (DPSLC) implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) from 2005 has had a limited effect on the rural landscape management due to seasonality of the plants, uniformity in cropping support, limited linkages to other activities, and so on.
Therefore, the following measures are proposed in this study to address these kinds of problems:
1) Local committment to ensure the participation of various actors in managing the rural landscape and to strengthen local governance;
2) Promoting the brand image of the area based on the landscape resources;
3) Adopting cross-compliance measures aimed at managing the rural landscape by residents themselves; and
4) Surveying rural landscape resources nationwide and constructing the databases.
Researcher: Seong, Joo-in
E-mail address: jiseong@krei.re.kr
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