Top-down, government recognition and incentives to support sustainable business models
Argument
Sustainability-enabling policies play a crucial role in fostering long-term, responsible tourism and economic practices by providing formal recognition and support for sustainable business models. Government initiatives, such as certifications, labels or incentives, help recognise and strengthen local efforts, encouraging environmentally and socially responsible entrepreneurship. By backing practices like farm succession and the establishment of new rural enterprises, these policies contribute to economic resilience, community revitalisation, and the broader adoption of sustainable development principles.
Practical applications
The Grands Sites de France policy: a landscape process for shared landscapes
The Grand Site de France label is awarded by the French State, through the ministry responsible for landscape policy, to the manager of a remarkable site protected by its official classification. It recognizes the site’s significant heritage value, the quality of its maintenance, and the interest of the preservation, management, and enhancement project to which it is subject. The label allows the territories concerned to adopt an experimental policy of cross-cutting actions (cultural landscapes, tourism, forestry, water, agriculture, etc.) with the objective of preserving, enhancing, and managing their landscape over the long term through a “landscape process.” This process relies on the attachment of residents, local actors, and users of the territory to the landscape, involving them as stakeholders in territorial projects by creating spaces for cooperation, sharing, and joint responsibility. In this way, new forms of governance and socio-economic models oriented towards cooperation and the social economy can be experimented with. The landscape process is thus similar to the commons approach, as it addresses environmental, social, and economic issues in a transversal and integrated manner. Tourism, a fundamental element of the Grands Sites policy, can then serve as a concrete lever for considering the uses of the landscape, its preservation, and its enhancement. Viewed through the lens of hospitality, tourism in the Grands Sites can be an important tool for caring for both the territory and its inhabitants.
The Intermunicipal Pastoral Pact (Pacte Pastoral Intercommunal) Causses Aigoual Cévennes: a territorial common shaped through negotiated law
The Intermunicipal Pastoral Pact (PPI) of Causses Aigoual Cévennes illustrates a legal innovation that reverses the usual direction of norm creation without opposing existing legal frameworks. It is based on local co-construction and the recognition of a pastoral common in a context marked by tensions between pastoral usage rights and the fragmented structure of land ownership. Initiated by livestock farmers concerned with maintaining and developing pastoral activity—which forms the socio-ecosystemic foundation of the territory—the “reappropriation” of pastoral space required identifying landowners and entering a process of negotiation involving local actors, elected representatives, and public institutions. Within this dynamic emerged the idea of a territorial project grounded in collectively shared values. The territorial charter proposed at the scale of all municipalities within the intermunicipal structure takes the form of the Intermunicipal Pastoral Pact. It is based on an analysis of existing rights and pastoral practices and formalizes, through intermunicipal deliberation and a prescriptive normative framework, the collective uses of the territory. The pact legally codifies territorial values and establishes, through planning orientations, rules governing the movement of herds and specific land-use planning instruments. It recognizes collective usage rights, enabling the fluid circulation of livestock and the multifunctional use of space alongside private property rights. Several legal innovations have emerged from this process, including pastoral easements, pastoral property clauses, and pastoral zoning. The pact reconciles private interests with objectives of general interest, embedding the territory and its cultural and agropastoral landscapes within the framework of UNESCO World Heritage. Pastoralism is proclaimed to be of collective interest, and the territory is designated as having a “pastoral vocation,” implying public policies oriented toward the conservation of the pastoral common.
Regulation for shared administration of commons
This Italian administrative tool, designed by the Laboratory for Subsidiarity (Labsus) with the Municipality of Bologna and later applied in other Italian cities, follows the introduction of horizontal subsidiarity in the Italian Constitution in 2001. The Cooperation Pact (Patto di collaborazione) enables public authorities to retain strategic control and legal responsibility while establishing co-responsibility over local commons: green space maintenance, cultural animation, renovation and valorisation of heritage commons, use of spaces, etc.
