The presence of different operators therefore creates a TL polarization. The strength of its operators comes from the ways they manage their interpretation of the landscape. As landscape producers, they speak different languages and have diverse relationships with public institutions. If, on the one hand, central TLs impose a market rationale and seek public legitimacy, peripheral or marginal TLs often have difficulty in experimenting new forms of entrepreneurship and cooperation, based on practices of resistance. These, often bold, upstream and critical practices point, in the first place, to the need to define less generic rules that are more attentive to the context. Rules that regulate conservation while, at the same time, facilitating an adaptation of TL to contemporary life and to working conditions.

20.4Planning, Policy and Governance Guidelines

For each of the TL classes, specific planning, policy and governance guidelines are identifiable, as briefly indicated in the summary table. The guidelines focus on TL as physical infrastructure, set of functions (production, water and land management), source of ecological services, territorial framework and landscape figure.

Even in conditions of irreversibility or quasi-irreversibility, TL1 might be affected by eco-systemic practices of reacquisition based on specific plans and rules. This hypothesis could be coordinated with re-naturalization or recolonization policies (with wooded cultivation, in some cases) identifying the most appropriate governance in terms of gradients of naturalness. In many contexts, it may be useful to rehabilitate the “civic uses” and the “community lands” (see Community Land Advisory Service in UK), especially in mountain areas where they sometimes account for 30–40% of the municipal surface (Alves and Pedro 2009).

Reversibility of TL2 is a great opportunity, which is often overlooked, especially arranging eco-systemic services and the strengthening of spatial frames. In this perspective, planning can significantly contribute to defining the standards and the rules on land cover and land uses but, above all, in appreciating the local energy, food and climate balance sheets. These planning interventions can also affect TL3, whenever negative externalities need to be limited.

Perhaps more than any other class, TL2 requires special attention in terms of policies, since it involves contexts where experimental practices (of production and) are rather common with significant effects on employment and entrepreneurship.

In many cases, the practices, values and principles are incompatible with existing market rules. Indeed, these practices may implicate economic principles as those fostered by alternative processes: for example, forms of circular economy at the local level, forms of food self-sufficiency, barter trade, alternative complementary currency or quasi-money, land and time banking, and so on. Policies should interpret such innovations and support them through incentives, and tax reductions: especially to create jobs, to raise broader awareness of the state of eco-systems or to encourage and strengthen social interactions. Several opportunities have emerged