Criteria for sustainability and their application at a regional level:: the case of clearing islands in the Dubener Heide nature park (Eastern Germany)

The objective of this paper is to identify criteria for sustainability at a regional level (intermediate scale) for the evaluation of landscapes. The study site and the criteria were chosen while keeping in mind the situation in Eastern Germany, where the political change in 1989 has had tremendous influence on structures of cultural landscapes. These changes have been investigated in a rural area, north of Leipzig: Dubener Heide, This region now has the status of a nature part, so recreation and nature conservation have been explicitly added to the many functions of the landscape for the socio-economic survival of the people living there. Agriculture used to be crucial in supporting these functions. The rapid decline of agriculture in this marginal area is endangering the income of farm households and adversely affecting nature conservation and recreation. To revive the multifunctionality of the landscape, agriculture as a main land user could be embedded in the concept of sustainability, which itself has to integrate ecological, socio-economic and cultural aspects, There is a vast variety of published criteria for sustainability, but most of them relate to a very small scale (global level) or to a very large scale (field level). To evaluate sustainability on a intermediate scale (regional level), there is a need to derive criteria from the local level by agglomeration and from global level by differentiation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.