Participatory landscape sustainability assessment: where do we stand? A systematic literature review

ContextIn line with inter- and transdisciplinary approaches promoted in Sustainability Science, Participatory Landscape Sustainability Assessments (PLSA) are developing at a rapid pace. PLSA approaches share with other assessments the aim of standardizing observations, while sharing with participatory processes place-based and context-specific viewpoints from diverse stakeholders.ObjectiveThis literature review presents different PLSA approaches identified in studies, and argues that the lack of a coherent framework and poor substantive theorization can limit the development of PLSA research.MethodsThe study involved a systematic literature review on a corpus of 425 publications, combining bibliographic mapping on the full corpus and a content analysis of a sub-corpus of 138 full texts.ResultsThe review of the literature showed that (i) PLSA studies lie at the intersection of ecology, landscape planning and sociocultural approaches, (ii) PLSA indicators evaluate on average 4.7 categories of sustainability, but most are applied at a local level and provide a snapshot of a situation, (iii) stakeholders tend not to be involved in the choice of indicators (only 28.9% of studies) and even more rarely in assessment design (7.2%). When stakeholders are included, they are usually only asked to populate preidentified indicators (63.9%). (iv) Diverse viewpoints are taken into consideration mainly by using indicators (67.3%) rather than by promoting discussion (39.8%). Three types of PLSA study can be differentiated: the participation-oriented approach, the contributive approach (rooted in positivism) and the collaborative approach (rooted in constructivism).ConclusionWe advocate that future PLSA studies pay more attention to consistency between their objectives, the methods they employ, and the theoretical grounding they enlist. This might help to avoid confusion about different participatory approaches and to understand their respective contributions to Landscape Sustainability Science.