How do the parts of a landscape begin to work as a system?
Natural systems are integrated. Fragmentation arises in how we perceive and manage them, particularly when we focus on separate elements rather than their interconnections.
What matters is not only who is there.
It is what passes between them.
Information. Resources. Influence. Stories.
Integration describes a shift away from one-way regulatory dominance towards bidirectional regulatory exchange.
Institutional fragmentation
We divide the system into silos.
Institutional arrangements can separate management of interconnected landscape elements.
Perceptual disintegration
We do not perceive the interconnections.
The relationships between system elements can fall outside the way actors understand the landscape.
Regulatory incapacity
Unseen inter-relations are difficult to monitor or regulate.
Actors may have few capabilities to regulate relationships that are not detected or examined.
Where is your landscape on the integration spectrum?
Explore four dominant integration states and how regulation changes from threat and command to transaction and mutual regulation.
Conflict
Threat and coercion dominate regulatory relations.
Relationships are characterized by conflict, withdrawal or rupture, with weak or hostile exchange.
One transition changes the logic of the system.
Most movement along the integration spectrum is incremental. The transition from Compromising to Collaboration is different.
Power accumulation → power sharing. Transactional → transformational relationships. External → internal generation of governance capacity.
Integration is not homogeneity.
At the integrated end of the spectrum, actors function collectively while maintaining productive diversity.
Difference does not disappear. What changes is the regulatory relationship between actors: whether difference is weaponized, suppressed, negotiated or held within collective practice.
A collaborative landscape can still contain pockets of conflict. Integration describes the dominant quality of relationships, not a pristine or static condition.
Homogeneity
Sameness is not the goal.
Integration
Different actors remain different, but relationships become mutually regulating.
Read an integration state through five lenses.
The Playbook examines each state through the conditions that shape self-organization, the distribution of regulatory capacity, and the practices that reproduce the state.
Container
What holds actors together, and where are the boundaries?
Across the typology, containers range from collapsing or highly fragmented, through imposed and contested boundaries, towards containers sustained through institutions and collective identity.
Difference
Which distinctions matter, and what happens to them?
Difference can be weaponized, managed, contested or accepted. Integration does not require difference to disappear; its significance and regulatory effects change.
Exchange
What passes between actors, and in which direction?
Information exchange is especially revealing because its direction and openness provide an observable indication of how power is distributed. At the broadest level, the spectrum shifts from threat to command to transaction to mutual regulation.
Power and governance geometry
Where is regulatory capacity concentrated?
Conflict and coordination tend towards monocentric governance. Through cooperation and collectivism, regulatory capacity becomes increasingly polycentric – distributed across multiple connected centres.
Practices – meanings, materials, competencies
What everyday practices reproduce this state?
The Playbook uses the meanings-materials-competencies framework to show how each state is enacted and sustained through what people do, the things and spaces they rely on, and the capabilities they develop.
Geographic extent
How far does each actor’s regulatory reach extend?
An actor with disproportionate influence may sit far outside the biophysical landscape. Integration may therefore require attention to wide-extent regulatory relations before cross-sector connections within the landscape.
What did the portfolio show?
Across Landscapes For Our Future, integration was both the central promise and a central challenge of ILM.
Water repeatedly emerged as an effective integrator.
Where projects identified a shared watershed, wetland, aquifer or irrigation system, otherwise dispersed interests often converged around it. Water makes interdependence tangible: scarcity or excess affects multiple actors, and water quality at one point reflects practices upstream.
Disintegration was the most common condition observed.
Single resource systems were often divided across ministries and jurisdictions with absent, overlapping or contradictory coordination. In those settings, integration was less about writing another shared plan than creating a venue in which existing plans could be reconciled.
Integration is a system state, not an output.
Conflict, cooperation and deep collaboration can coexist in different actor configurations within one landscape, and those states shift with droughts, elections, price changes and leadership transitions.
Read the relationships in your landscape.
The Integration chapter suggests looking for fragmentation in connections rather than merely cataloguing actors.
Integration is generated, not delivered.
In the Playbook, ILM emerges when interaction spaces begin to work productively and previously isolated or one-way relationships become bi- or multidirectional.
It does not require all actors to agree. It requires that they can regulate one another rather than one actor regulating all the rest.
Sense who influences whom, what is flowing and what is blocked.
Shift the conditions governing exchange, voice and regulatory capacity.
Integration is an emergent condition, not a methodology imposed from outside.
Trade-offs are deliberated and negotiated; conflict can be held through arrangements that give parties voice.
Go deeper, or read the full chapter.
Choose the level of detail that is useful to you.
Read the full Integration chapter
The complete Integration chapter, including the detailed typology, examples, evidence and references.
Explore the four states
Conflict, Coordination, Cooperation and Collectivism, including their eight sub-states.
Follow the connections
Return to the concept ecosystem and continue through the Playbook from another entry point.
