We invite staff from Southeast Asian integrated natural resource management initiatives – including staff from regional landscapes projects and organisations – to join us for a participatory workshop in which we gather practical experiences, identify success factors, explore barriers to integration and showcase SE Asian experiences.
Format
The workshop will use a highly participatory methodology called ‘Liberating Structures’ that emphasises ideation. Presentations will be kept to a minimum, with organisers designing a more engaging, multi-directional approach to showcase the landscape experiences of participants, and to share knowledge and reflections.
Background
Landscapes approaches are not new, and include variants such as river basin planning, ecosystems planning, conservation agriculture, and many others. Common to all of these approaches is the call for integration, emerging out of the recognition that silos are a major problem in Natural Resources Management (NRM) and governance. Integration is a concept explicitly addressed in Integrated Landscape Management (ILM), Integrated Water Resources Management, the Water-Food-Energy Nexus and other NRM approaches.
The idea of ILM remains broad, and there is no single way to ‘do’ ILM. At its most basic, ILM calls for using landscapes as a conceptual unit around which integration can be achieved and management implemented. Nevertheless, operationalising ILM remains a challenge.
Many landscapes approaches have been attempted in Southeast Asia, gaining a valuable body of knowledge and experience. These include several LFF projects that are now nearing completion.
Justification
Tackling the complexity of the polycrisis: problems of silo formation are persistent in common NRM approaches and raise significant questions for traditional governance structures and institutions, with important implications for the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals and climate change mitigation. It is important to consider and gather practical experiences around integrated landscape approaches – successes, challenges and strategies – to add substance to the idea of ILM and how it can be achieved and implemented in practice. This workshop sets out to derive practical experiences of implementing landscape initiatives across a variety of SEA contexts, to address the objectives stated below.
Objectives
- To share practical experiences on implementing landscape approaches in Southeast Asia.
- To identify success factors where ILM ambitions have been achieved.
- To explore the barriers to integration, and strategies to overcome these.
- To showcase Southeast Asian landscape experiences.
- To lend substance to the ILM concept as an effective planning and implementation framework.
Guiding questions
- Why does integration matter?
- How can we integrate in a landscape context?
- How can different land use values be reconciled under a landscapes approach?
- How does ILM equip us to deal with complexity and inevitability of failure in the project cycle?
- In what ways can systems-based approaches inform landscape management?
- How can state vs community interests in be addressed in a landscape setting?
- How can landscape approaches contribute to climate change mitigation and/or accomplishing the SDGs and other relevant global and regional goals?
