What determines the demand for programmes providing local environmental public goods

Benefits from providing a local public good such as landscape protection may depend on individuals’ physical surroundings, as well as on socio-economic factors such as income. A framework is formulated that describes public support for regional landscape protection as a function of socio-economic variables and land use patterns. Models are then estimated using data from a referendum on increasing public funding for local landscape protection in the Swiss canton of Zurich, using detailed land use statistics. These represent proportions of open landscape and landscape features that are viewed as particularly valuable for aesthetic and other reasons. Cross-sectional estimation results suggest that attitudes towards public landscape protection are indeed strongly influenced by the local landscape and its recent dynamics. A comparison of results for this local environmental public good with referendum outcomes on national-level environmental issues and non-environmental public goods is also presented.