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Reconciling different social interests through integrative landscape approach: example of the River Neretva Valley, Croatia

The basic motivation for the present research was the lack of landscape planning approaches within the spatial planning process in Croatia. In practical terms, it entails several dissimilar deficiencies which were addressed in this research. The most important is integral inclusion of the public opinion into the planning process. Within landscape planning, public participation is taken into account through dealing with the conflicts between diverse social groups which may arise. Since spatial planning has a key role in the harmonization of the needs and management of the resources it often faces the conflict between requirement for the development and need for the protection, especially if it comes to conflicting demands of different social groups. However, due to inadequate tools and methods that would point to optimal and sustainable solutions that take into consideration all the criteria simultaneously, decisions are made ‘ad hoc’. So, the landscape approach defined by Sayer et al. (2013) can harmonize protection and development through interventions in the different components of the landscape. In areas like River Neretva Valley, that was chosen as the research area, often lacked an integrated approach to landscape planning (Roe, 2000), which usually resulted in conflicts between users and thus the lack of inclusion of all interest groups in planning and decision making. The sectors of nature protection, agriculture and hunting were chosen as target social groups of the empirical research, because they were identified as most affected (Čaldarović, 2006). So, the main objectives of the research were (1) to determine the need of harmonizing the various interests in the planning of sustainable spatial development and (2) to identify criteria for landscape evaluation within different social groups in the area of Neretva Delta. Theoretical and practical parts were conducted simultaneously which has enabled comparison and data updating and has resulted with more accurate and objective results. Transformation of the public opinion, whether it is expert or lay public, into the evaluation models which can be cartographically represented and implemented into the spatial planning procedure is very important step forward the sustainable development.

andscape planning, public participation, landscape evaluation, protection, development, River Neretva Valley

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