When the Regime goes Local: Detailed Case Description, Summary of Cases, and Description of the Swiss Institutional Soil Regime.

Our research project is dealing with the question of the role of economic and ecological added and reduced values and how its redistribution improves the sustainability of qualitative and quantitative soil management policies. It focuses on the following four objectives: 1) Understanding how various types of added/reduced economic and ecological values of land/soil are created and how they interact within three of the most problematical types of (functional) spaces in Switzerland: agglomerations, tourist areas, and rural periurban areas. 2) Comparing, in a theoretical and a methodological perspective, existing and innovative new policy instruments dealing with the question of land/soil added and reduced value redistribution under the aspect of their capacity to achieve the objective of a more ecological land use. 3) Testing - through three quasi experimental/scenarios based case studies - various (sets of) existing or new policy instruments that could strengthen the redistribution of land and soil property and use rights as well as of land/soil ecological and economic added/reduced values in a more sustainable way and at a functional space scale. 4) Formulating specific, innovative and applicable policy recommendations, based on the three quasi-experimental and scenario based case studies, concerning the way of developing new redistributive institutional and policy designs, compatible with the existing federal land, soil, and subsoil property rights regimes.