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The European Union’s Landscapes for Our Future programme supports 22 integrated landscape management projects across 19 countries and 3 sub-regions across the Global South.

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Newsletter #9 | December 2024

Learning together. Learning from you. That's the theme of this month's knowledge-packed newsletter.

🙏  Sawadee ka(p)!

Greetings from Bangkok, where we gathered Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) practitioners and European Union colleagues from across the region to learn and unlearn together. That’s very much the theme of this newsletter, in which we launch a Landscapes in Practice brief on stakeholder identification and invite you to help us document the knowledge that the Landscapes For Our Future (LFF) programme has surfaced so that your learnings can benefit other projects and shape future policy.

On the subject of the future: if your project is coming to a close, we invite you to store and share your photo and video material in the LFF archives for continued access well after your wrap-up.

Plus, whether it’s to share hard-learned lessons or to pick the brains of the experts among us, remember that our ILM community of practice is only a WhatsApp away

KNOWLEDGE

Lesson learning overview

To generate lessons learned that are not evident when analysing single projects, we are undertaking a structured analysis of patterns of performance in ILM implementation across the 22 LFF initiatives. This analysis will provide valuable insights to practitioners, policymakers, researchers and donors who want to design and implement ILM interventions.

🫵  That’s where YOU come in. The question of what makes ILM work is one we can only answer together. We are asking representatives of each of the 22 projects in the LFF programme to please fill in our survey to capture some of the details and findings from your initiative. We then have a series of steps planned to filter the learnings that are emerging from across the programme.

Find out more and access the survey now.

Get started

New publication: Our primer on Stakeholder Identification and Analysis

Stakeholder engagement is a precondition to ILM success. But let’s be honest: many project implementors realized very late that the stakeholder identification at the outset of our projects was not ideal.

🥳  Good news: it’s never too late. Stakeholder relevance and relations will change over the course of a project intervention, so stakeholder analysis is not restricted to the beginning of an initiative but is necessary throughout its duration.

This latest publication in our Landscapes in Practice series offers a primer on the key concepts surrounding this key success factor, and plenty of leads on resources and reading.

Get the guide

EVENTS

We were there: Biodiversity COP in Cali

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has set the bar high, envisioning harmonious coexistence with nature through ambitious targets requiring collective effort from political, sectoral and social spheres. At aside event to COP 16, Herencia Colombia, one of our seven Latin American projects, convened experts and practitioners from diverse fields to share insights into achieving these goals through ILM.

Khalil Walji, our Central Component Deputy Coordinator, was our man in Cali. He highlighted the role of ILM in addressing complex land-use challenges and underscored how innovation and sustainable practices are critical in designing pathways that balance ecological preservation with human development. Khalil’s perspective emphasized fostering collaboration among local communities, policymakers, and researchers to create holistic solutions. This work exemplifies how ILM can bridge gaps, create synergies, and deliver tangible results on the ground.

Webinar: Iterative learning and adaptation in ILM

Drawing on their experiences implementing ILM projects in the Latin America and Caribbean region, participants in this interactive exchange discussed the role of iterative learning, approaches used to learn in a systematic manner, and experiences using learning to adapt landscape management initiatives. Their valuable experiences could aid your present and future ILM initiatives wherever in the world you find yourself.

Watch the webinar

RESOURCES

Your image archive: Easy sharing, storage and access

With so many of our projects looking towards finalization or motivating for extensions, now is the time you are probably scrambling to find just the right picture to illustrate your reports and publications, or you’re trying to figure out what to do with all of your own media so that it can live on after your project has closed. The Landscapes For Our Future digital media archive has you covered.

Visit the image library

Store and share photos: Leave a legacy

Want a secure place to store your project’s photos and videos after you and your team have waved goodbye? Or you want an easy way to manage and share your project’s visual material – including logos and working design files as well as finished publications? Just hit that blue ‘upload’ button on the menu bar, or email Dominique to load them for you: d.leroux@cifor-icraf.org.

Archive your images

Forum: Your space. Your community.

What have you learned lately? Or where do you feel a little lost? Our WhatsApp community, with its subject-specific groups, is where ILM practitioners can find support and applause from our peers. Go on: share your insights, ask questions, brag a bit or look for help. We’re all here together.

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Landscapes in Practice: Stakeholder Identification and Analysis

Landscape condition and sustainability depends on what its stakeholders are doing. ILM practitioners cannot, therefore, avoid considering stakeholder activities. This Landscapes in Practice paper provides an overview of the key concepts and the tools and resources available for learning more.
LIP Stakeholder identification 241114 interactiveDownload

Landscape condition and sustainability depends on what its stakeholders are doing. ILM practitioners cannot, therefore, avoid considering stakeholder activities. The problems exhibited in landscapes emerge out of these activities, so implementing processes that change stakeholder behaviours and practices is central to ILM considerations. It is generally accepted that the higher the level of stakeholder engagement, the more likely an intervention is to succeed, and the more likely its effects will be sustainable.

Landscapes, it should be noted, are complex –and stakeholders are a source of much of this complexity because of their multiple, and often divergent, needs and interests (i.e., to exploit or conserve resources), rights (formal and customary) and levels of legitimacy, dependence on resources, power and influence (economic and political), knowledge, preferences and values. Stakeholders often have competing goals that require mediation to balance trade-offs (if an initiative is promoting changed behaviour) and are embedded within social networks, interactions and responses. If landscapes are to be managed in integrated ways, stakeholders and their various interests must be a major consideration in the design of ILM interventions.

Key messages

  • Stakeholder engagement is a precondition to Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) success. The higher the level of engagement, the greater the likelihood of success and sustainability.
  • Stakeholder identification and analysis is complicated by diversity amongst stakeholders, which emerges from variable interests, different types of knowledge, and contexts. Most stakeholder engagement, identification and analysis approaches try to reveal and understand this complexity.
  • Stakeholder analysis is strategic. It allows interventions to determine who they should engage with to succeed and which inter-stakeholder relations should be targeted for attention.
  • The ‘strategic relevance’ of stakeholders is determined by the degree to which they are judged to influence a project’s success.
  • There are usually competing or contradictory interests among stakeholders, often expressed as conflict. The presence of conflict amongst stakeholders should be assumed from the outset and can represent a significant risk to intervention success.
  • The strategies used to engage with (and between) stakeholders will reflect their strategic relevance and can be brainstormed and deliberated through the development of a Theory of Change.
  • Engaging with stakeholders calls for the deployment of ‘soft-skills’ such as mediation, facilitation, convening and negotiation.
  • Stakeholder relevance and relations will change over the course of a project intervention. As such, stakeholder analysis is not restricted to the beginning of an initiative, but is necessary throughout its duration.
View more titles in this series

Stakeholder engagement toolkit for ILM

SHARED is a tailored method for stakeholder engagement with evidence, managing relationships and brokering multi-stakeholder and cross-sectoral partnerships.

Applying human-centred engagement with evidence to shift decision culture, SHARED works to strengthen the linkages across science, practice and policy. Through a tailored process to decision-making, centered around people and knowledge, transformational change toward sustainable development can result.

Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) involves navigating the complexity and uncertainty inherent in balancing the diverse interests of stakeholders. Multi-stakeholder processes are critical for transforming landscapes into more equitable and climate-resilient systems. Engaging stakeholders is a long-term investment in systemic change, as it is essential for co-designing an impact pathway that reflects the shared goals of all involved. These engagement approaches are applied at various levels, from policy processes to local communities. For meaningful collaboration, the processes must be open, accountable, inclusive, transparent, and legitimate. This requires innovative tools and strategies that foster trust, reduce power imbalances, elevate marginalised voices, and promote collective learning. Achieving this enhances the sustainability of partnerships and increases the likelihood of creating more resilient and equitable landscapes.

This toolkit has been designed around the SHARED engagement planning framework. The key objective of the toolkit is to assist project teams within the Landscapes For Our Future (LFF) programme and broader stakeholders working to manage and execute landscape initiatives. The SHARED engagement framework and structure of the toolkit brings in expertise, tools and processes from the LFF network and key insights from associated scientists and practitioners which have been collated as part of our practitioner series Landscapes in Practice (LIP).

The toolkit provides a mix of specific tools to execute a structured engagement process which have some guidance on steps, materials and timelines. The key essence of the toolkit is to provide a mix of practical exercises, tools and key reflections to help empower project teams to enhance their stakeholder engagement work. Project teams do not need specialised external help to execute engagement processes and so this toolkit aims to provide practical exercises and wider reflections around stakeholder engagement processes including relationships and power as aspects to reflect on. The toolkit is not a linear set of exercises and the tools can be tailored to different project contexts.

The toolkit – still in draft version at present – also contains reflections and insights which come from engagement with LFF teams, including a virtual training, detailed project meetings and co-learning opportunities.

Download the (draft) toolkit

Newsletter #8 | September 2024

Having visited you and your landscapes, our focus this year is on documenting learnings and sharing them.

With this as the goal, please do bookmark and join our upcoming events – all highly participatory.  (We promise: No boring 🥱 PowerPoints. Engagement is what we love.)

EVENTS

Fundamentals of facilitation and stakeholder engagement

We see it time and again in Integrated Landscape Management: you’re wanting to tackle complex decisions but don’t have the tools or the training to support you. You’re wanting to shift towards more inclusive, inter-sectoral and inter-institutional integration in decision-making, but where to even begin?

Those who attended our Global Summit last year will recall the session in which Mieke Bourne and Friedah Wanda presented the SHARED approach. The feedback was clear: this is a useful approach and set of principles you can apply in your landscapes, not only for decision-making now, but as a legacy paradigm and process that will live on long after your project is over.

Intrigued and want to know more?

You are invited to join us via Zoom for a two-hour workshop on the fundamentals of stakeholder facilitation and engagement. Based on the SHARED Decision Hub framework.

Register now

🌏 SE Asian regional workshop

We invite staff from Southeast Asian integrated natural resource management initiatives – including staff from regional landscapes projects and organisations – to join us for a highly participatory workshop in which we gather practical experiences, identify success factors, explore barriers to integration and showcase SE Asian experiences.

Find out more

Missed us in Kinshasa?

In June, we held a side-event to the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP) in Kinshasa, DRC, where we discussed Integrated Landscape Management as a solution , and launched our new Landscapes in Practice series. Couldn’t attend in person? Here’s a little wrap-up courtesy of one of the local television stations. (If your French – like so many of ours – doesn’t extend beyond ‘je t’aime’, don’t forget to activate subtitles in your language as you view the video. 😊)

More about the event

KNOWLEDGE

New in our Landscapes in Practice series: Iterative learning & adaptation

Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) entails dealing with complexity and uncertainty, of which the interests of diverse stakeholders are an important part. Management strategies such as Adaptive Management and Collaborative Management have emerged to address these challenges and have been operationalized as an approach called Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM). 

This Landscapes in Practice edition aims to offer an overview of the common themes and concepts across these approaches, identifying lessons and proposing ways in which they can contribute to an ILM process. It also synthesizes steps to incorporate iterative learning processes and adaptation into ILM-focused programmes and projects. 

Ultimately, our goal is to explain key concepts and identify essential steps for practitioners who employ an ILM approach to develop the critical pillars of iterative learning and adaptation within their project cycle.

Get the guide

REFLECTIONS FROM THE FIELD

From conflict to collaboration through inclusive landscape governance: evidence from a contested landscape in Ghana

In this new paper, our colleague James Reed and his fellow authors describe an engagement and visioning experience in Northern Ghana that holds lessons for ILM practitioners in so many of our landscapes.

“Despite the contested nature of land and natural resource use, stakeholders were able to agree on specific issues of common concern and an idealized shared vision of a future landscape… We expect that the theory of change model and recommendations within can inform the development of a sustainable landscape management plan and future evidence-based policy,” write the authors.

Read more

We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Have you read and used any of the Landscapes in Practice series of publications? Do you have learning requests or success stories to share? Let’s keep the conversations flowing: add your comments in our WhatsApp community of practice. – Kim and the Central Component

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Practice insights: Bridging the conservation and development trade-off in the Maasai Mara

The recent call to halt biodiversity loss by protecting half the planet has been hotly contested because of the extent to which people might be excluded from these landscapes. The authors of this paper argue that it is clear that incorporating landscapes that implicitly work for indigenous people is vital to achieving any sustainable targets. They examine an attempt to balance the trade-offs between conservation and development in Enonkishu Conservancy in the Maasai Mara, using a working landscape approach

Mobile livestock production strategies are theoretically consistent with wildlife-based activities and can present a win-win solution for both conservation and development. The authors explore the success and failings of Enonkishu’s evolving attempts to achieve this: addressing the criticism of the conservation sector that it fails to learn from its mistakes.

They find that Enonkishu has had considerable positive conservation outcomes, preventing the continued encroachment of farmland and maintaining and improving rangeland health relative to the surrounding area, while maintaining diverse and large populations of wildlife and livestock.

The learning from certain ventures that failed, particularly on livestock, has created institutions and governance that, while still evolving, are more robust and relevant for conservancy members, by being fluid and inclusive.

Practical implication: Diverse revenue streams (beyond tourism, including a residential estate, livestock venture and philanthropy) enabled Enonkishu to withstand the pressures of COVID-19. Livestock is crucial for defining the vision of the conservancy, and the institutions and governance that underpin it.

Download the paper

Sustainable Landscapes Rating Tool

The Sustainable Landscapes Rating tool supports both landscape actors and landscape investors by providing a rapid, objective, evidence-based assessment of key jurisdictional policies and governance conditions within an identified region or territory.


Co-developed by the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People programme (1000L) and partners EcoAgriculture Partners, Rainforest Alliance, and Conservation International, this tool helps landscape leaders assess and track the progress of key conditions needed for true landscape sustainability, including land use planning and management, land and resource tenure, biodiversity and other ecosystem services, stakeholder coordination and participation and commodity production systems.

The Sustainable Landscapes Rating Tool enables a rapid assessment of the key conditions for jurisdictional policies and governance that enable sustainable landscapes. The Tool provides a snapshot of a jurisdiction’s capacity to establish and ensure effective functioning of policies, plans, strategies, regulations, monitoring systems and multi-stakeholder platforms, which, collectively, have been found to be important in supporting sustainable landscapes.

The Tool applies an objective, evidence-based rating system to assess each of the identified key conditions. It collects and organizes complex information about policies and governance into a structured and easy-to-understand format.

Landscape actors including sub-national governments, producer organizations, NGOs and civil society organizations can use the tool to:

  • Communicate externally about the status of key enabling conditions to attract investment and other support
  • Benchmark progress on establishing enabling conditions against internationally-recognized criteria
  • Build support among diverse stakeholders and facilitate planning to address gaps.

Investors including investment funds, banks, commodity sourcing companies, bi-lateral and multi-lateral development agencies and international NGOs can enhance their investment decisions by using the tool to:

  • Identify jurisdictions likely to help them meet sustainability goals
  • De-risk investments by providing a due diligence framework to unpack and understand key policy, legal, governance and other enabling conditions
  • Identify priorities for policy and governance support that will help to facilitate transition to green growth.
Download this tool

Landscapes in Practice: our ILM overview

Landscapes in Practice is a new series of practitioner guides to facilitate implementation of the six core dimensions of lntegrated Landscape Management (ILM). In this introductory brief, we provide an overview of what ILM is – in particular, how we have approached the concept – and the reasons why it is needed.

We then look at the Landscapes For Our Future (LFF) approach to ILM – the initial hypothesis that we proposed that allowed us to then explore the concept across six dimensions: stakeholder identification, multi-stakeholder fora, common vision, institutionalization, adaptivity and tools.

Here, we will only provide a brief introduction to the six dimensions. Five more Landscapes In Practice briefs will accompany this introduction, exploring each of the dimensions in greater detail. There will be no brief on ILM tools – these were initially defined as a separate dimension but, due to the contextual nature of this topic, it is better addressed as an aspect of each of the other five dimensions.

Key messages

  • Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) is a process for fostering co-created sustainability and resilience in landscapes through adaptive, inclusive and integrating strategies.
  • Lack of integration in Natural Resources Management (NRM) is a major problem. This is fundamentally an institutional problem that requires a new approach to address the challenges of natural resource management. •
  • In the literature, there is a high degree of consistency around what comprises a ‘landscapes approach’. We identify five areas where there is broad agreement: they acknowledge that landscapes are socialecological systems; they typically call for high levels of stakeholder engagement, require high degrees of adaptivity, acknowledge landscape multifunctionality, or call for multi-, inter or trans-disciplinarity.
  • Based on experience and the literature, the Central Component of the Landscapes For Our Future programme hypothesized that ILM comprised six highly interconnected dimensions:
LIP ILM Overview 240529bDownload
Get the other guides

Toward systemic change in landscape finance

New financial pathways have the power to channel more meaningful and integrated investments in landscape-level initiatives. This report sources ideas and solutions from leading experts in the field on the steps needed to scale up integrated landscape finance (ILF) for the benefit of people and planet.

The world must rapidly shift toward inclusive, sustainable, and resilient economies that balance the needs of people and the planet. This requires transformations not only at the individual farm, enterprise, supply chain, and urban center levels, but also holistically at the landscape scale to address critical ecological, economic, and social processes. Integrated landscape finance (ILF) offers a solution.

ILF is a developing approach and set of tools that generate finance from diverse sources to achieve local objectives for landscape transformation. The approach assumes that ecological, social, and economic interactions among different projects and enterprises in a landscape can have powerful negative or positive interactions on profitability, risk, and impacts. It offers a model for financing multiproject, multisector investment portfolios that encourage synergies between investments and positively impact multiple objectives (e.g., biodiversity, climate, and food production). As such, it addresses the limitations of conventional project-based, sector-focused, short-term finance and generates holistic transformation. Landscape partnerships of key stakeholders develop the vision for transformation and help guide this coordinated investment agenda.

However, despite its promise, systemic barriers slow the uptake of integrated landscape finance. Landscape partnerships often lack the capacity to build pipelines of projects, assess current and potential finance flows, and develop strategies and fit-for-purpose mechanisms to mobilize them. Short-term, uncoordinated commercial, philanthropic, public, and civic sector projects are poorly aligned at best, and at worst, undermine integrated strategies for landscape transformation. Financiers lack the experience, capacity, and mandate to invest across sectors and at necessary scales to make a systemic impact.

This report by the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People (1000L) programme aims to address current barriers to the effective implementation and scaled-up use of ILF by offering collaborative paths forward. It is based on 1000L’s Finance Solutions Team’s framework for mobilizing key actors to transform the finance system to support integrated landscape investments.

Get the guide

Lessons from P4F’s Portfolio

'Landscape Approaches' provides valuable lessons on designing sustainable, integrated, and responsible practices

This report shares examples of how companies have designed and/or supported approaches to protect forests and ecosystems from across Partnership for Forests (P4F’s) portfolio. Organised by region, the publication highlights 20 initiatives, with each description including the local context and information on the drivers of deforestation, the interventions made, lessons drawn from these experiences, and the business case for the private sector.

Jurisdictional Approaches Resource Hub
Download the Landscape Approaches pdf here.

First up: who is P4F?

Partnerships for Forests, in the words of their website, catalyses investments in which the private sector, public sector and communities can achieve shared value from sustainable forests and sustainable land use.

By creating market-ready ‘Forest Partnerships’ that offer an attractive balance of risks and benefits for the private sector, public sector and communities, the programme aims to mobilise significant investment, principally from the private sector. The programme also supports demand side measures that strengthen demand for sustainable commodities, and activities to create the right enabling conditions for sustainable investment.

The eight-year programme is funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It currently operates in Central, East and West Africa, South East Asia and Latin America.

And what is the Jurisdictional Approaches Resource Hub?

This great platform of resources is aimed at helping private sector action in jurisdictional approaches. Find out more here and access a range of publications and tools.

About this report

This report is designed to support companies and investors with operations or investments in agricultural value chains across the tropical forest belt that want to take action to achieve their landscape-level sustainability effectively.

Get the report

Building on Tropical Forest Alliance (TFA), World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Proforest’s Practical Guide on ‘Landscape Scale Action for Forests, People and Sustainable Production’ (2020), this guide was created to help companies to undertake sustainable landscape and jurisdictional initiatives. It is organised into six overarching intervention types, with 20 specific activities companies can take. Written from a business perspective, it provides key points to companies thinking about undertaking similar activities, including external conditions that improve the likelihood of success and the business case for taking each activity forward.

While you’re there…

Sign up here for the Jurisdictional Action Network’s newsletters. We have. 😊

The ILM cheat sheet 😊

Though each landscape is singular, landscape partnerships all encounter common challenges in carrying out collaborative action. To make the process easier, more effective and more inclusive, the 1000L initiative provides this generic, locally adaptable, conceptual process and practical guidance for carrying out ILM.

Our friends at 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People have been producing some really useful tools for landscape practitioners. None more so than A Practical Guide to Integrated Landscape Management.

We’re fans of this practical guide – one in a series of other useful products that they are rolling out. If you’re working in ILM but suspect you might not be fully conversant with all the basic theory, consider this your cheat sheet. (Available in English and Spanish.)

Download the guide

Here’s how the authors themselves explain the rationale behind the useful guide they have created:

Working towards ILM requires reaching agreement on a shared landscape vision and strategy among stakeholders who have different and sometimes competing priorities, often with diverse interests, perspectives, influence, cultures and languages, and sometimes with histories of conflict. 

Though each landscape is singular, LPs all encounter common challenges in carrying out collaborative action. For the majority of stakeholders in a given landscape, what we call landscape literacy is typically low. People are generally not familiar with the overall economic, population and ecological flows within the landscape, nor how resource management impacts in one part of the landscape affect other parts. Information relevant to land use decisions and practices is often difficult to access, compare and evaluate. Stakeholders operate at different scales within the landscape, with producers, buyers and government agencies working across farms,supply chains, land use types or administrative boundaries. This reality makes it hard to align their priorities.

Furthermore, while policies often aspire to sectoral integration, in many parts of the world public programs and regulatory agencies still operate in policy silos. The result is fragmented short-term government interventions. Potential synergies between different actions go unexplored. And while raising and allocating finance is a critical part of transitioning to a world with resilient landscapes, many finance institutions are not organized to handle landscape investments.

To make the process easier, more effectitive and more inclusive, the 1000L inititiatitive offers this Practical Guide to ILM. The guide provides a generic, locally adaptable, conceptual process and practitical guidance for carrying out ILM. The guide is intended for LP conveners, facilitators, leaders, members and supporters.

The 1000L coalition created this Practical Guide to ILM by incorporating the collective experience of 1000L partners. The guide refers users to a supplemental tool guide of suggested tools that can support collaborative landscape planning and action. 1000L is creating additional tools and resources to further support these processes and serve the diverse needs of LPs worldwide.

Inspiration and sources for the ILM Practical Guide

The Practical Guide to ILM was inspired and informed by global learning from field experience. Pulling from an array of literature, consultations and surveys over several years, Sayer et al. (2013) developed the 10 Principles for a Landscape Approach. Scherr, Shames and Freidman (2013) summarized ILM’s key features being used across 80 communities of practice. Brouwer et al. (2015) developed foundational work on Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships.

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