Technology or policy? Drivers of land cover change in northwestern Spain before and after the accession to European Economic Community

Major changes in land cover can result from distant political, social, and environmental forces. Over the last 50 years, many technological innovations and political changes have transformed agriculture in Europe, resulting in substantial decrease of farmland area in many parts of the continent that potentially signify a shift in European land use systems. However, the relative importance of technological advances and agricultural policy to these changes is not well understood, and our goal here was to disentangle them. Because of its unique political context, Spain offers an ideal laboratory to investigate the impacts of technological and political innovations to regime change in land systems. During the time when agricultural innovation was at its peak (1960-1980) Spain was not part of the European Economic Community (EEC). The Spanish agricultural sector then experienced a shock after joining the EEC in 1986. Using historical aerial photographs, land use maps, and Farm Structure Surveys as our reference data, we compared changes in land cover in Terra Cha, a district of Northwest Spain from 1956-1984 and 1984-2005, i.e., approximately before and after the EEC accession in 1986, using spatially explicit multinomial logit models to quantify the relative impacts of technological innovation and political change on agriculture and forest lands. In our study area much more substantial shifts in agricultural and forest land took place after EEC accession than before. The dominant shift was a substantial increase in forest cover (from 7% to 31% of the landscape) and concurrent loss of agriculture (from 45% to 38%) and shrubland (from 46% to 27%). The role of drivers acting at parcel level was constant between time periods, which suggests that accession to EEC was a strong driver of change. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.