Participatory landscape sustainability assessment: where do we stand? A systematic literature review

Abstract Context In line with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary principles of Sustainability Science, Participatory Landscape Sustainability Assessment (PLSA) studies are developing. These studies make the paradoxical promises to standardize observations to obtain robust and comparable data, while including a diversity of case studies, stakeholders and viewpoints. Objective The purpose of this paper is to highlight the diversity of perspectives on PLSA, arguing that the lack of coherent framing and a poor substantive theorization can limit the development of PLSA studies. Methods We conducted a systematic literature review on a corpus of 425 publications by combining bibliographic mapping on the full corpus and a content analysis on a sub-corpus of 138 full-texts. Results Our results showed that (i) this field is at the crossroads between ecology, landscape planning and sociocultural approaches, (ii) indicators combine on average 4.7 categories of sustainability, but are most applied at a local level and in a snapshot perspective, (iii) stakeholders are rarely involved in the choice of indicators (28.9% of studies) or in the assessment design (7.2%), and are mostly only asked to populate pre-identified indicators (63.9%), and (iv) viewpoint diversity is taken into consideration mainly by using indicators (67.3%) rather than by promoting deliberation (39.8%). In sum, we distinguish the participation-oriented approach , the contributive approach (anchored in positivism) and the collaborative approach (anchored in constructivism). Conclusion We advocate that future studies should be more explicit on the perspective they adopt in order to improve consistence between PLSA objectives, methods, and theoretical anchorages. This clarification might ultimately avoid confusion about the different regimes of participation and their respective contributions to Landscape Sustainability Science.