This text has developed from a shared interest in the relationships between globalisation and rural landscape change and sustainability. We believe that consideration of the implications and intersections of global policy agendas for markets and sustainability through comparative analysis of the changing structure and function of a range of local agricultural landscapes offers a distinctive contribution to the wider scholarly and policy debate on landscape sustainability.

Our primary objective is to enhance understanding of the ways in which contemporary agricultural landscapes are changing in response to emerging market conditions, technological developments, and changing sociocultural and environmental conditions for farming, under different public policy frameworks. A second objective will be to provide theoretical and practical policy insight into the potential for local agricultural landscapes to adapt to global influences in sustainable ways. Specifically, we examine the way in which the global market liberalisation policy and international sustainability agendas intersect within agricultural landscape systems of selected Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the USA. Two complementary analytical perspectives are drawn together: landscape ecological research on change in agricultural landscape systems, and landscape planning and agri-environmental policy analysis.

The content of the text has been shaped through the preparation and presentation of a symposium at the 2007 World Congress of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE), held in Wageningen, the Netherlands. The symposium was titled ‘Globalisation and the sustainability of agricultural landscape systems’, and many of the chapter authors were participants.