Ecological networks of boundaries and land consolidation

One common perspective for future of rural landscapes is freedom regarding ways how productive resources can be mobilized and what opportunities are recognized for ecological diversity. Land fragmentation as scattering of individual land plots stands in contradictive relation to fragmentation of landscape, exposing challenges for understanding connections, movement and access that exist as constituents of valuable geographical environments in different fields of planning (Bentley, 1987).
Several studies have demonstrated how 20th century landscape change can be traced in patterns of field enlargement and vanishing of small biotopes (Ihse, 1995; Agger & Brandt, 1988). Thus, boundaries have historically served as interstitial and communicative zones of high ecological and cultural value. Complexity of property through its spatial manifestations and social practices is embedded in landscape and its networks (Blomley, 2016).
Currently, a new policy framework of land consolidation is being defined in Latvia. Taking place later than in most other European countries, development of legal instruments for rearrangement of parcels and boundaries is founded on the premise that new forms of land exchange and valuation should be applied in land consolidation projects following the end of land reform. Hence, overcoming the threshold of ‘scattered’ ownership is an overarching goal recognized in agricultural and land management policies.
Peculiar to post-socialist landscapes are varied meanings and locations that spatial elements take either in opposition or alliances with legal and social division of land. Rather than following a linear path of merging and homogenization, the patterning of property after collapse of Soviet Union has restituted democratic management institutions that may endanger ecological landscape structures due to polarisation of economic powers, however, the new ‘landed’ community of decision-makers also bear promise of enacting development in collective and environmentally sustainable ways.
The aim the study is to investigate the prospects for preserving networks of boundaries and small-scale landscape elements in agricultural landscapes by attending to emerging discourse on land consolidation in Latvia. First, land re-parcellation will be discussed in reference to implementation of land-use policies linking territorial levels of governance with separate fields of regulation. Second, the role of small-scale elements in development of contemporary pattern of ownership and practices of landscape management will be compared over a period of 20 years. Finally, environmentally protective regimes in ecological boundary formation will be situated within land consolidation approaches in Latvia.