Applied landscape economics: a personal journey of discovery

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Abstract
Putting cash values on the environment facilitates commoditization and political capture of evaluation. However, individual citizens may also wish to know the appropriate trade‐off of values, in order to use political power properly. Willingness‐to‐pay offers insight into consumers’ valuation of landscape, but routine application of economic methods to land use decisions meets major problems, especially the data needs of cost — benefit analysis in face of the urgency of decisions, and the insensitivity of conventional methods to subtle landscape changes. These problems require the citizen‐as‐consumer to make personal judgements of value, but to link those values to a cash scale for the purpose of making trade‐offs. Such judgements can be entered into an orderly framework, in which the judgements can be exposed for comment, which itself exposes the assumptions of commentators. The decision about routing electricity transmission lines in Scotland provides an example. Recent interest in environmental economics gives the opportunity to broaden the scope of the method.

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