Vortragsankündigung
4. Juni 2025: Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Markus Leibenath, Prof. Dr. Tanja Mölders, und Prof. Dr. Ludger Gailing im Rahmen des online Symposiums „Landscape Planning Futures“.
Prof. Dr. Markus Leibenath, Uni Kassel, Prof. Dr. Tanja Mölders, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg und Prof. Dr. Ludger Gailing, Brandenburgischen Technischen Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg halten im Rahmen des online Symposiums „Landscape Planning Futures“ am 4. Juni 2025 einen Vortrag.
German landscape planning at 50: time to broaden the scope? A conceptual proposal to bring landscape planning into dialogue with political ecology.
Landscape planning as a complement to comprehensive, regulatory land use planning was introduced in Germany in 1976 by the Federal Nature Conservation Act. Since then, it has evolved from a relatively technocratic and analogue approach to a more communicative and largely digitised planning instrument that seeks to identify interfaces with other types of plans and actors. In response to criticism that German landscape planning is too detached from people’s needs, and also in reaction to a neo-liberal zeitgeist, attempts have been made to strengthen economic considerations by recourse to the notions of natural capital and ecosystem services, although German landscape planning has from the outset been closely linked to a biodiversity-offsetting scheme. Other critiques, however, point to the ambivalent and problematic relationship of landscape planning – and nature conservation more generally – to capitalism and its obsession with economic growth and consumerism. As a result, proposals have been voiced – inter alia – to rethink landscape planning and nature conservation in terms of socio-ecological transformations, to acknowledge the political character of landscapes and landscape planning, to reflect their often-obscured social and cultural biases, and to embrace concepts such as relational values, care and resonance.
Taking up these lines of thought, this paper aims to bring landscape planning into dialogue with political ecology. By political ecology we refer to a broad strand of theoretical reasoning and empirical research that is united by a common focus on the political implications of social constructions of nature and related policies, and by a sensitivity and critical stance towards power and domination. In particular, we concentrate on four interrelated key objects of political ecologists‘ critique, namely: (a) dualistic notions of nature, gender, and use versus protection; (b) capitalism and the pro-growth paradigm; (c) uneven global relations, extractivism, and (neo)colonialism; and (d) epistemic universalism.
The argument is developed in three steps: First, we give a brief overview of landscape planning in Germany. We distinguish landscape planning in the narrow, statutory sense from landscape planning in the broader sense, understood as less formalised kinds of planning, such as non-binding landscape visions and strategies or novel arrangements of landscape governance at the intersection of nature conservation and other policy sectors. We also consider some of the criticisms levelled against landscape planning. Secondly and most importantly, we unpack the above-mentioned key foci of political ecologists and discuss their relevance for landscape planning in a western country such as Germany. Finally, we outline a research design to empirically assess the analytical power of these concepts. We do this with a view to the mostly drained fen landscapes that cover large swathes of northern Germany, represent a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, and therefore attract the attention of landscape planners of all sorts.