Landscape as mediator. Collaborative practices across territories, farmers, and institutions

This thesis examines the role of landscape mediation in the governance and collaborative transformation of agro-silvo-pastoral territories. It addresses the structural fragility of small-scale farming in Europe and the limits of the Common Agricultural Policy, which has largely favoured productivist and large-scale models while overlooking the socio-economic and ecological conditions of marginal and mountain agriculture. In this context, agri-environmental measures have often reduced transition to short-term technical adjustments, neglecting the territorial, cultural, and socio-economic dimensions of landscape change. The thesis argues that the three French cases of landscape mediation analysed here offer useful insights for Italian initiatives facing similar challenges. Understood as situated practices that mobilise landscape both as a shared object and as a tool for territorial action, these cases help illuminate how Tuscan experiences might strengthen governance arrangements, spatial strategies, farmer engagement, and long-term collaboration. The research is organised in three parts. The first situates the study within planning theory and debates on mediation, linking French scholarship on landscape mediation with international work on communicative and collaborative planning. The second examines three long-term French cases, showing how mediators, institutions, and farmers progressively built relationships, produced situated knowledge, and co-constructed strategies for territorial transformation. The third turns to Tuscany, analysing agricultural parks, biodistricts, and regional landscape projects in a context where the landscape approach remains weakly embedded in planning practice. Their comparison makes it possible to identify the conditions that support learning and coordination over time. The thesis shows that the effectiveness of landscape mediation lies in the articulation of process and content design. It is shaped, on the one hand, by the organisation of collaboration over time through continuity, dialogue, and mediating roles; and, on the other, by the use of spatial representations and other intermediary objects that make territorial change visible and discussable among farmers, technicians, and institutions. By foregrounding farmers’ perspectives, the research shows how landscape can function as a mediating device that supports coordination, learning, and collective territorial action.