Seventeenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Imagine arriving in an unknown city, you are disorientated and confused, but you know there are plenty of attractions to discover. You open a tourist guide, you look at the alternatives and you chose a place, that’s where you want to go. Now you need a transport map to show you the way and you are finally ready to move. In the literature, many studies claim that land use scenarios can be valuable guides and maps to show possible futures and how to act to go towards the one you chose. However, very few studies verified if these scenarios are guiding the political decisions and which is their real impact on decision making. The main goal of my research project is hence to evaluate the effects and the usefulness of scenarios on the decision-making process according to three variables: the different stakeholders’ group (technicians, politicians, and farmers), the way scenarios are constructed and presented to the final-end users, and the evaluation moment. The last aim is to provide practical recommendations to support researchers in every stage of making scenarios, boosting the translation of scenarios into different land management actions. Starting from a long-term ex-post evaluation of land use change scenario, we analyze their impacts on different stakeholders’ groups finding that they were strongly influenced by the way they are constructed, and the dissemination effort carried out after the study. The political environment, and its instability also represented a considerable barrier to translate scenarios into action.