The influence of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) on the landscape planning legal framework of Italy, Spain and England is discussed. The ELC defines landscape, holistically, as something perceived by people in their everyday life. Integrating landscape protection and management into every policy influencing the quality of a territory is a major ELC’s goal. This view challenges the interpretation that stresses the continuing importance of objective landscape values, such as natural beauty, recognisable by expert assessment. This dialectic also reveals a fault line between local democracy/participation and a centralist approach towards landscape protection. We found signs of such competing narratives in the landscape planning regulations of the said jurisdictions implementing the ELC, although the rationales that inspire them were little affected. We argue that the said dialectic may be seen more as an opportunity to build a more comprehensive system of landscape protection than a downside.

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The European Landscape Convention adopted in 2000 is only now beginning to attract attention from scholars and public institutions. It is the first international act adopted by a European institution with the aim of promoting the protection, management and planning of the European landscape. The novelty of the Convention is that it offers a multifaceted perspective of landscape. Nonetheless the absence of specific rules to be applied risks hindering the implementation and enforcement of the Convention. Therefore, it appears necessary to invoke the aid of international law notably the prescriptions of the Aarhus Convention and European legal rules enshrined in the EC environmental directives for European Impact Assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment.

Twenty years on, the implementation of the Landscape Convention has been just partially applied to landscape management. This is due to the Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code and its insistence on landscape assets, whose regulations appear to be divergent from the principles of the Convention. Nonetheless, the regional landscape plans approved so far present some innovative planning guidelines where it seems possible to identify a number of the principles of the Convention, even if local implementation is still limited.