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.

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.

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.

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…

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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.)

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.

Solutions and opportunities of integrated landscape approaches

Dr Cora van Oosten's keynote presentation at GLF Climate, alongside COP27, provided an insightful overview of the whole spectrum of what is contained within ILM.

Cora van Oosten is a hugely experienced landscape practitioner, with 25-years worth of practical, hands-on field experience: she and her team from Wageningen University, Netherlands work to manage, govern and restore landscapes in an economically viable and socially acceptable manner. That’s a pretty good grounding in the subject matter, right? 

Her presentation at GLF Climate, alongside COP27, (watch the video or read the transcript below) provided an insightful overview of the whole spectrum of what is contained within ILM. With characterful illustrations, she cuts to the chase on what needs doing – about getting out of informality, of harnessing the strengths and mobilizing the capabilities of the various actors. And of the bridging roles ILM can play. Integration, she made clear in her talk, is not just across sectors but across scales.

Keynote address transcript: Cora, in her own words

Landscapes For Our Future: Actually, I think this programme is managing to move away from solely focussing on the problems and the challenges that we face and is moving into the solutions and the opportunities that landscape approaches offer, to build ourselves a better future 

Landscapes For Our Future joins the restoration movement, and joins in the great movement that we currently have with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, but it’s not joining the global hype, and steamrolling over the world with a message of global restoration…

It rather focuses on the landscapes themselves and zooms into the reality on the ground. So, it doesn’t look at landscapes from the top, but rather it moves from the bottom and looks through the lenses of landscapes, trying to turn the tide.

And that’s where I really start liking this programme. It aims to focus right on the landscapes. Here you see an image with the multiple functions of a landscape, water, biodiversity, habitation, agriculture, commercial agriculture and urbanization. 

But not only that. It also looks at the multiple actors that actually steer and drive these landscapes into the future. We see not only the producers but also the consumers who are connected through global trade movements. It connects also to the international commitments and conventions such as COP27. It looks at trade agreements with investors aiming to work with all these actors in a coherent manner. 

Trying to bring all these actors and different actors into a sort of institutional space, where they can share, discuss and even fight to try or align their multiple interests and come to some sort of a collective plan. And notice here also the youth and biodiversity is being taken on board.

So the plans, and of course the investments that are needed to fund these plans and make them a reality – and by investments I’m talking not only about asset investments (so investing in the real products that are generating) but also the enabling investments(such as the process that is needed to guide this process in the right direction.)

The programme will focus a lot on these multi-stakeholder collaborations, or as I like to call them, governance arrangements. 

Not only that because, in reality, we all know that these landscape level arrangements can be very nice, very happy, very constructive but, too often these arrangements stay within the shadow of the hierarchies. They find it hard to get out of informality and rather stay informal and, therefore, are not capable of moving into the policy realm and making a true impact.

That is why this programme will look at the capabilities of all the different actors that we’ve seen and try to mobilize these. Not to really develop or strengthen because they’re already there but to mobilize these to be able to collectively drive the landscapes in the right direction.

Amongst all of these capabilities, we have first of all the substantive capabilities. The capabilities of the landscapes, of its artifacts, of its trees, its biodiversity, of its different functions, and try to strengthen these

It also looks into the process capabilities which are actually those capabilities that help actors and policy makers to get out of the silos and create policies and processes that cut across the policy realms and restore landscapes in a more integrated manner.

The process’s challenge is also to help the different sectors to get out of their silos and instead of having them all making their plans separately…

…making them jointly, so that we get to integrated plans in which the public, the private sector, the civic sector work together, each from their own responsibilities, building our landscapes for our future. 

Finally, there are institutional capabilities. These are probably the most difficult ones and they refer to actors not only staying at the very local level using tools and techniques trying to make their landscapes better…

But, also to have these local actions travel up to higher level influences. Travel up to local official levels, and even up to the very top official level where they can enter into the world of policies. Then also to travel back down. And this is what some people call ‘scale’.

They can even travel up to the very institutional level. That’s probably the level where you are all looking at now in Sharm el Sheikh, and then mobilizing the capabilities of the multiple actors to work locally but scale these actions to higher levels: up to the top where they can be shaped into global processes and get back down to the local level.

With this, Landscapes For Our Future aims to build bridges between the landscape and the more formal political administrative reality.

It aims to do this by building all these partnerships, commitments, deals, programmes, relations but, also legislation to influence policies and infiltrate all these international commitments and conventions to really build a bridge between the local and the international. 

That means that Landscapes For Our Future is really meant to be Landscapes For OUR Future – that is building the bridges for all of us, for environment and for people, for society to move together in the same direction. 

And let us all use this conference in Sharm El Sheik as a boundary object to bring us closer and move towards a better future for ALL of us. 


A World of Landscapes @ GLF Climate

With most of our programme’s 22 projects well into implementation, it was time to start sharing key insights and lessons. Where better to do so than at GLF Climate alongside COP27?
View our full hour-long session recording on YouTube

A COP27 side event, GLF Climate was a venue most appropriate to LFF’s ambitions – in particular, its interest in delivering solutions and innovative practices to address the triple planetary crises. During this session, the LFF Central Component brought together relevant stakeholders and some of LFF’s projects from the Global South to highlight innovative approaches and methods to tackle climate mitigation and adaption using the Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) approach, as well as introducing the overall programme vision.

High-level speakers from the EU and ILM global experts set the stage for the programme, with particularly important messages revealing the importance the EU places on ILM as one of a basket of solutions to addressing climate change.

“It’s really our firm belief that integrated landscapes approaches can make a really meaningful contribution to alleviating the interconnected challenges of human well-being, climate change biodiversity loss and land degradation.”

– Chantal Marijnssen, Head of Unit for Environment, Sustainable Natural Resources in DG INTPA at the European Commission

AGENDA

TimeSessionPresenter 
5 minWelcome & quick polls  Moderator – Dominique le Roux, CC Communications CoordinatorIn person 
5 minWelcoming high-level remarks Chantal Marijnissen, Head of Unit for Environment, Sustainable Natural Resources in DG INTPA, European Commission Virtual
10 minKeynote:Integrated Landscape Management – an essential tool to address today’s contemporary climate and biodiversity objectives. Characteristics + focus on climateKeynote Dr. Cora van Oosten, GLF and Wageningen Centre for Development InnovationVirtual
10 minLandscapes for our Future Initiative – Integration and balancing stakeholder objectives.CIFOR-ICRAF LFF Programme Coordinator- Dr. Kim Geheb In person
10 minA world of landscapes- highlighting projects of the LFF Initiative, with focus on climate.  1.     Abeena Dufie Woode PM – EU LEAN, LLF Ghana
2.     Miriam Seeman, Coordinator, Water as a connector for resilient landscapes – LFF Bolivia
In person  Virtual (ESP)
18 minPanel Discussion – On Landscapes and people for ClimateDominique le Roux, Cora Van Oosten, Kim Geheb, Abeena Woode, Miriam Seeman, Etienne CoyetteIn person and Virtual
2 minClosing remarks Kim Geheb