Valuing landscape preferences with perceptive and monetary approaches: two case studies in Italy

This thesis presents two distinct participative approaches, qualitative the first and monetary the second to analyse people preferences for landscape management. The first approach analyses people opinions about the impact of some specific landscape elements on the landscape of a protected wetland area in northern Italy, while the second applies a stated preference technique, choice experiments, for the valuation of the benefits of different potential landscape settings of a urban forest near Venice.

Embracing the definition of landscape provided by the European Landscape Convention that defines landscape as "perceived by people" suggesting to apply participative approaches in the development of landscape policies, the objectives of this thesis are:

1) verify if the preferences expressed by means of opinions in the absence of visual stimuli are similar to those expressed by scoring images;
2) analyse the effect of the presence/absence of some elements on the preferences of the two groups of respondents;
3) to understand whether choice experiments can be structured (designed) to value landscape providing both welfare estimates and planning support, objectives that are usually achieved applying two distinct approaches: a stated preference valuation (either contingent valuation or choice experiments) and a perceptive study

The thesis consists of two main parts: the first part (chapters 1, 2 and 3) presents the theoretical framework for understanding the need to value landscape, its contextualisation in economic theory and the main valuation methodologies that can be applied to its valuation with particular focus on choice experiments. The second part of this work (chapters 4 and 5) is devoted to the presentation of the results obtained from the application of the two valuation approaches to the two case study.