Land-use planning and public preferences: What can we learn from choice experiments method?

In this article we discuss the economic approach to evaluate landscape preferences for land-use planning. We then use the choice experiment method to examine public preferences for three landscape features – hedgerows, farm buildings and scrubland – in the Monts d’Arrée region (in Brittany, France), in the context of re-design of landscape conservation policy by the local environmental institute. Surveys were undertaken on two user groups, visitors and local residents. Our objective was to obtain empirical evidence of the difference between the preferences of tourists and residents, for landscape attributes. We then analysed the welfare changes of tourists and residents affected by different landscape programmes. Our results point out the strong divergence between the landscape preferences of the public and those of local public actors. The comparison of the estimated values of willingness to pay for single-attribute landscaping action shows some divergence between residents’ and tourists’ ranking of preferences for agricultural landscape areas.