From Marrakesh to Bali: What does the landscape approach look like in practice?

10 November 2016 Driving innovation

To get you in the mood, our partner CIFOR discusses how we can put integrated landscape approaches into practice. If you want to know more, make sure you attend their side event on Friday morning.

What are integrated landscape approaches and how do we put them in practice on the ground?

By James Reed & Terry Sunderland

These questions – important when considering sustainable land-use management amid competing demands – will be discussed at the upcoming CIFOR and partner-hosted side event at the PEFC Stakeholder Dialogue in Bali and the Global Landscapes Forum in Marrakesh.

Integrated landscape approaches have received a groundswell of support from across sectors in recent years as a means to more sustainably manage land use within tropical landscapes. There is a growing body of theoretical knowledge conceptualizing how a landscape approach framework might best be applied in a practical sense. However, there is a suggestion that, as yet, this knowledge is not widely being translated into evidence of the effectiveness of the approach in practice.

Amongst other factors, this could be a result of the approach either not being widely implemented, or that practitioners simply lack capacity or incentives to evaluate and report progress where the approach has been applied.

Reviewing theory of landscape approaches

In order to provide background to these assumptions, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its partners recently completed reviews of both the theory and implementation of landscape approaches in the tropics. Our findings suggest there is support for both assumptions – we found only 24 examples of landscape approaches reported within peer-reviewed scientific publications, but a further 150 within the grey (or unpublished) literature.

However, despite this limited evidence base, we discovered some interesting and encouraging patterns when comparing the findings of the theory review with those of the implementation review.

By overlapping some of the findings of the two reviews, we can illustrate where congruence exists between the recommendations of conceptualists and the experience of practitioners. Our review of the theory literature revealed that multiple authors found consensus around a few key points that they considered to be fundamental for effectively implementing a landscape approach.

“Our findings from case study examples of landscape approaches in the tropics found that community engagement, institutional support and principles of good governance were considered to be the three most significant factors contributing to effective landscape approaches,” highlighted James Reed & Terry Sunderland.

The findings reinforce the perception that in order to effectively implement and achieve ongoing commitments to landscape approaches, a clear focus on context and stakeholder engagement are necessary from the outset. Furthermore, institutions should be in place to maintain regular and ongoing processes of discussion and negotiation.

As countries continue to develop strategies for achieving their commitments to global climate and development goals, a landscape approach offers a potential implementing framework.

However, in order to stimulate more coordinated policy development, research and practitioner communities need to provide further recommendations on how to make the transition from theory to practice.

This will be the challenge for participants in both upcoming events

Each will present the experiences of actors operating in various sectors and scales with representation from the water, forest, agriculture and private sectors, and policymakers and practitioners, among others. These experiences will then be integrated to help contribute to bridging the knowledge-implementation gap.

A knowledge-sharing platform will then be established following the two events that all participants will be encouraged to engage with – the objective to further establishing action points and refined frameworks for implementation based on practical experiences.