The search for virtue: Sustainability and systemic protection of agricultural heritage

Heritage literature on cultural landscapes has been mainly guided by the definition given in early 1992 to account for the interactions between nature and culture and a Western aesthetic conception of landscape. Since then, and despite the hindsight given by almost 30 years of practice, little empirical analysis has been done to renew this theoretical framework. At the same time, the development of economic science applied to culture and heritage has made it necessary to aim for sustainability in the preservation of heritage. Yet, here again, few links have been made between the economic resources of cultural landscapes and the objective of social, cultural and economic sustainability. The distinctive model of the World Heritage property Les Climats du Vignoble de Bourgogne (Climats, Terroirs of Burgundy) has opened up a new field of comparative analysis among world heritage agricultural landscapes and pushed forward the heritisation of agricultural lands as a lever for territorial development in a perspective of social, cultural, economic and educational sustainability. The aim of this paper is to present an empirical reflection on the manner and measure with which sustainability is applied to the protection processes of the different components of agricultural landscapes and to suggest replicability for other agricultural territories.