George Schoneveld
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a paper that tries to answer what I think is quite a fundamental question: what ultimately defines whether an Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) initiative performs well?
Looking beyond the theory
There’s been a lot written about ILM in general and about how ILM should be done. There are also many single case studies looking at how particular landscape initiatives performed and whether they complied with the normative principles of ILM. What our team wanted to do with our research was to push it in a different direction: we wanted to look at how ILM is actually being operationalized in practice. Why do we see uneven performance between projects? What dimensions of ILM get implemented well, and what dimensions are different projects struggling with?
One of the things that made this research possible was the learning process developed through Landscapes For Our Future. Across 15 landscapes, Central Component teams worked with practitioners through a series of learning missions, spending several days together reflecting on project experiences and assessing performance against a common set of indicators linked to the different dimensions of ILM.
What I particularly liked about this process is that it wasn’t an external evaluation. The insights came from structured reflection with the people who know these landscapes best: the practitioners themselves. Working with my colleague Valentina Robiglio, who co-led the data analysis in the study, we were then able to explore the patterns emerging across the full dataset and ask what they might tell us about why some landscape initiatives perform differently to others.
The governance challenge
One of the first things we found was that most projects perform fairly well on what I would call the more activity-oriented dimensions of ILM. This includes things like establishing a common vision, or creating knowledge management and co-learning structures. These things matter, and they are often real achievements. But they are not the same as changing the institutions that make and finance decisions. The more interesting finding was what separates the stronger projects from those that underperform. Across the cases we studied, two dimensions consistently stood out: institutionalization and cross-sectoral integration.
If we look at institutionalization, what ultimately do we mean by that? We mean getting ILM arrangements formally recognized and resourced and carried by local institutions. If a project comes in for three to five years and then leaves the landscape, what happens next? If you don’t institutionalize the ILM approach within local governments and budget cycles, chances are it’s not going to survive.
Cross-sectoral integration presents a similar challenge. What we expect is that different stakeholders establish mechanisms for more effective collaborative planning and collaborative decision-making. In practice, this is where projects really struggle. It was very clear from the research that political and institutional conditions matter enormously. There is, in some ways, a ceiling effect. Where landscapes are characterized by poorly aligned authority structures, weak coordination, fragmented mandates or poor political incentives for collaboration, it becomes very difficult for ILM projects to deliver durable structural change. This is also where power matters as a practical question of who controls mandates, budgets, information and access to decision-makers. If those relationships do not shift, participation can remain visible but not consequential.
That doesn’t mean an ILM approach isn’t valuable. Quite the opposite: ILM has great potential, and we see this in some landscapes where it has managed to deliver meaningful and durable changes. But it also suggests that many landscape initiatives are expected to solve problems that are fundamentally political and institutional in nature, despite operating through relatively short-term projects with limited influence over the governance systems that ultimately shape long-term outcomes. The research suggests that an ILM-based project is not a panacea for persistent integration problems.
Getting the sequence right
We have to be realistic: if we’re talking about typical project cycles, you cannot build the political and institutional structures needed for effective landscape governance in a few years. That requires really long, sustained investment in the capacity and willingness of local institutions. And that’s a different type of project.
Let me explain.
A large infrastructural project or big commercial investment invariably changes the local incentive structure – potentially creating more demand for land, perhaps providing an influx of population, improving mobility, and changing local rent-seeking structures. This can really upset the existing political institutional context. Introducing ILM in such an unstable situation can be very, very challenging and likely not going to achieve very much. Instead of investing in a place in a way that completely undermines or upsets the whole governance system, you want to first build the participatory structures, the participatory governance mechanisms, the intersectoral coordination, to be able to absorb those investments effectively without undermining the complete governance system.
In many cases, participatory governance structures, coordination mechanisms and local ownership need to be built before major investments enter a landscape. Otherwise those investments risk reinforcing the fragmentation and competition they were intended to address. ILM should therefore inform the design of investments from the outset rather than be introduced afterwards to manage their consequences.
The research also pointed to something encouraging: where political and institutional conditions are favourable, ILM projects can succeed through different pathways. Some rely on operational capacity – a strong implementation machinery, good technical know-how and clarity about how things should be sequenced. Others rely more on relational capacity – the ability to build trust, capitalize on local knowledge, and be involved in adaptive management and learning. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other, but both only appear to work where the wider political and institutional setting leaves room for them to matter.
What surprised me most was not that governance matters. Most practitioners already know that. What surprised me was how consistently institutionalization emerged as the weakest dimension across such a diverse set of landscapes. For me, one of the most important conclusions is that ILM should not be thought of simply as a project. Instead, it is a different way of governing landscapes. The question is not only whether we are implementing ILM, but whether we are creating the conditions that allow it to endure long after projects have ended. Perhaps the real question is not how we design better landscape projects, but whether we are willing to invest in the governance systems that allow landscape approaches to survive once projects end.
The paper is still under review, and I look forward to sharing the full findings soon.
You might also be interested in…
Beyond the numbers: understanding how landscapes change What shapes success in Integrated Landscape Management (ILM)? While quantitative analysis can help identify patterns, Kim Geheb argues that many of the factors that matter most – trust, relationships, local leadership and the ability to “read” a landscape – are often harder to measure, but no less important.
