The European Landscape Convention, Wind Power, and the Limits of the Local: Notes from Italy and Sweden

The European Landscape Convention is the first international agreement to deal with all aspects of landscape planning, protection, and management. It emphasizes transparency, democracy, and good governance as integral parts of ‘landscape’. The ELC may inspire member states of the Council of Europe to develop better tools for planning land use and the environment; however its utility in practice is still largely untested. This article considers the relevance of the ELC to a major land use conflict in Europe today: the development of wind power. Two countries are used as case studies of this conflict. Italy and Sweden both contain iconic European landscapes, and both have become important sites of large-scale wind power development over the last decade. But the two countries also have divergent political, economic, and institutional traditions. The debate around wind power and landscape has therefore unfolded differently in the two countries. The article consists of three parts. The first part gives an overview of the growth in wind power, and the forms that opposition to wind power have taken, in Italy over the past decade. It is argued that implementation of the ELC's clauses on democratic, locally-based landscape planning process will encounter in Italy a major impediment in the form of political and economic corruption. The second part summarizes the development of wind power as part of the Swedish national energy strategy. Using a case study of a wind power planning process guided by the ELC, it is argued that what appear to be common landscape values in local communities often conceal fundamental conflicts among individuals, groups, and institutions. On the basis of these two cases, the third and concluding part sketches both the potential of the ELC to transform the planning process for wind power, and the real challenges it will face, as a non-binding, ‘global’ agreement, in ‘local’ places with their own histories, traditions, and social actors.