Prospects for sustainable land-use policy in Germany: Experimenting with a sustainability heuristic

Beate Fischer, Bernd Klauer and Johannes Schiller

Ecological Economics, 2013, vol. 95, issue C, 213-220

Abstract: Land is an essential yet limited natural resource. Its current unsustainable use highlights the need for sustainability policies. In order to explore potential policy strategies, we use the concepts of stocks and durable institutions as tools for analysing temporal structures in nature and society. These concepts are incorporated into a heuristic aimed at reducing complexity and finding windows of opportunity for policy action. The heuristic is applied to current German land-use policy. We show that the German government is highly unlikely to achieve its declared sustainability goal to reduce the rate of land conversion to 30ha/day by 2020. Analysis of the inherent dynamics of major stocks and institutions reveals that, even in a situation with stagnating or declining population, the inertia of institutions such as local municipal self-administration and the municipal financial system prevents the government's sustainability goals from being achieved.

Keywords: Sustainability; Land-use policy; Stocks; Institutions; Inherent dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q24 Q56 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:95:y:2013:i:c:p:213-220

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.09.006

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