Assessing the ability of rural agrarian areas to provide culturalecosystem services (CES): A multi scale social indicator framework(MSIF)

Assessing the ways in which rural agrarian areas provide Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) is provingdifficult to achieve. This research has developed an innovative methodological approach named as MultiScale Indicator Framework (MSIF) for capturing the CES embedded into the rural agrarian areas. Thisframework reconciles a literature review with a transdisciplinary participatory workshop. Both of thesesources reveal that societal preferences diverge upon judgemental criteria which in turn relate to differentvisual concepts that can be drawn from analyzing attributes, elements, features and characteristics of ruralareas. We contend that it is now possible to list a group of possible multi scale indicators for stewardship,diversity and aesthetics. These results might also be of use for improving any existing European indicatorsframeworks by also including CES. This research carries major implications for policy at different levels ofgovernance, as it makes possible to target and monitor policy instruments to the physical rural settingsso that cultural dimensions are adequately considered. There is still work to be developed on regionalspecific values and thresholds for each criteria and its indicator set. In practical terms, by developing theconceptual design within a common framework as described in this paper, a considerable step forwardtoward the inclusion of the cultural dimension in European wide assessments can be made.