Newsletter #13 | Feb 2026

Real-world lessons from landscapes – plus what's coming up in 2026.

Insights from ILM in action

We were delighted to receive authorisation to extend our work into a no-cost extension (NCE) period that will see us formally ending the Central Component in September 2026. This gives us room to breathe, think, consider and consolidate our learning from four surprising and revealing years, while still offering support to LFF projects that have themselves been granted NCEs.

So, what have we got planned?

Our work is currently dominated by two major outputs:

‘Global learning’ work – Our teams have been visiting most of the LFF projects, using a consistent methodology, to explore the ways in which each project has inclined towards ILM: the ways in which they have understood it, negotiated it, and the skills and strategies they have utilised to obtain it. I think this is going to be a very insightful product. The team has been dialoguing a lot on how we’re going to analyse this huge body of data, while still being sensitive to the perspectives and knowledge of the individual project teams. I see this exercise as advancing understanding of ILM and how it can be successfully achieved. Shout-out to the pair leading this initiative, Valentina Robiglio and George Schoneveld!

Then there’s the ILM Playbook. For me, this has been – and continues to be – a labour of love. My relationship with the AI tool, Claude, has flourished – I have found him (it?) an indispensable foil – to debate and argue with. My conversations with him run into the gigabytes.

What will the Playbook be? It is intended to fulfil several roles: an online course for would-be ILM practitioners, a bedrock for our accumulated understanding of what we have learned from the LFF, and a provocation to existing ILM practitioners. Whatever the case, it will be designed and, we hope, used to inspire new thought and reflection – and to advance a global ILM agenda.

And then there’s the plus, plus, plusses: additions to our Landscapes in Practice series, case studies and thematic papers, a series of country briefs, and a number of events that we are still discussing.

The next seven months will be busy and rewarding, and we look forward to sharing these outputs with you all. In the meantime, may 2026 be your ILM year!

– Kim Geheb
Coordinator
Central Component

Aha! What LFF taught us

As the Central Component, we spend a lot of time talking about co-learning and co-creation – about arriving in landscapes with curiosity rather than prescriptions. But as the Landscapes For Our Future programme comes to a close, we turned the question inward.

What surprised us?

Perhaps it was the penny dropping in Laos that strong team dynamics really matter when it comes to applying and adapting ILM, or perhaps it was the realization in Vietnam that sometimes landscape solutions need to be found from well outside the landscape. Perhaps it was seeing in Papua New Guineathat ILM has significant peace-building potential, or in Brussels, that ILM can be a really powerful way of heading off the unintended consequences of large-scale infrastructure projects.”
– Kim Geheb

LFF showed me that you don’t transform landscapes ONLY by rolling out innovations – as necessary as these are. By aligning people, incentives, and power, these innovations can succeed over time. Our innovations succeed when they’re human-led — when they start with listening and trust – and the technical solutions then follow.”
– Khalil Walji

For me, the main takeaway is that ILM succeeds when it stays grounded in real-life needs, remains flexible in practice, and puts people at the centre – not just in principle, but in delivery.”
– Divine Foundjem

I think that ILM is not about great project design. What generates a good ILM performance is probably something we do not talk about explicitly: the relational aspects. ”
– Valentina Robiglio

One key ILM insight for me is that trust and process matter more than tools.”
– Natalia Cisneros

I think my most significant lesson is that ILM is fundamentally a multicomponent process… Conceptualizing how integration worked across these dimensions pushed us to see the dimensions more as strands in a larger thread that wound around and supported the collective whole.”
– Peter Cronkleton

Read the full story

REFLECTIONS FROM THE FIELD

What does it take to bring diverse actors together in fragile, contested landscapes?

In a parish in Ecuador, the answer turned out to be water.

This case study shows how a shared concern became a catalyst for collaboration – helping government, communities, and technical partners align priorities, build trust, and turn Integrated Landscape Management from concept into practice. While grounded in one place, the lessons are highly transferable.

If you’re navigating fragmented governance, local capacity, or the challenge of turning strategies into action, you’ll find practical insights here – wherever you work.

Learn from Ecuador

When governance doesn’t exist, how do you make ILM work?

What does it take to practice ILM where there’s almost no permanent state presence, weak institutions, and deeply unequal power dynamics?

In Paraguay’s northern Chaco, the answer wasn’t perfect plans – it was adaptive learning, neutral facilitation, and creative coordination in a governance vacuum. The CERES project helped establish the first sustained collaborative processes in a landscape long managed at a distance, showing how small, pragmatic steps can unlock durable institutional change and bring unlikely partners together.

If you’re working in contexts where governance is fragile, actors are distant or disconnected, or power imbalances are the norm, this case study offers practical insights on sustaining momentum, building legitimacy, and anchoring collaboration without waiting for ideal conditions.

Learn from Paraguay

PUBLICATIONS

From dialogue to delivery

You read the blog, now read the report. ?

Our report on the Mauritius Biodiversity Stewardship Platform formation workshop goes beyond documenting an event – we wanted to capture a practical blueprint for building multi-actor platforms by using inclusive methods that surface diverse perspectives and move groups from dialogue to concrete action.

Even if you’re working in a different landscape, you’ll find actionable ideas for designing collaborative processes that build trust, generate momentum, and translate participation into implementation.

View the report

What we’ve been reading

Why Integrated Landscape Management matters

This short post is a great reminder of why we invest in ILM in the first place: landscapes are systemic, and so are the challenges we face — from food insecurity to climate vulnerability. By bringing farmers, governments, communities and the private sector together around shared resources like land and water, ILM strengthens food systems, livelihoods and resilience in ways that sector-by-sector approaches simply can’t.

Learning from doing: Closing knowledge gaps in integrated landscape research

This special feature collection highlights a big lesson for the research–practice interface: there are still critical gaps in how integration is defined, studied, and reported, especially around politics, power dynamics, gender dimensions and local knowledge. A key takeaway is that learning from implementation and empirically documenting what works (and why) remains essential to advancing ILM as both a practice and a field of study.

Best practices to benefit biodiversity and achieve resilient and sustainable infrastructure

This resource underscores how infrastructure planning and biodiversity outcomes are deeply connected. It offers practical guidance on how developers and governments can design infrastructure that supports ecological functions — a reminder that ILM isn’t only about social processes, but also about building systems that are sustainable from the ground up. (No citation available online but draws on best-practice principles.)

Do they actually work? Social conflict duration and conflict resolution mechanisms in Peru

Early evidence from Peru suggests that popular conflict-resolution mechanisms — like dialogue spaces — may not always shorten conflicts. In some cases, they can prolong engagement if credibility, capacity and broader institutional support are weak. The insight here for landscape practitioners is that mechanisms for dialogue need careful design and legitimacy to help transform conflict, not just host it.

Power and its discontents: The long road to systemic change in the aid sector
This article challenges the myth that incremental shifts in practice alone will rebalance deep power inequalities in development systems. While localisation and “shift-the-power” initiatives are gaining ground, the authors argue that meaningful, systemic change requires transforming where decision-making and financial power actually sit, not just boosting local participation in existing structures. It’s a crucial insight for anyone committed to genuine co-creation.

Reflections from the field

Dialogue in disintegrated landscapes: insights on stakeholder engagement

One of the six core dimensions of Integrated Landscape Management (ILM), as articulated in our Central Component’s initial hypothesis, is stakeholder engagement: inclusive, meaningful engagement of all those who shape or depend on a landscape is vital. But what does effective engagement look like in practice?

One sunny morning in Kenya, a lively discussion between Divine Foundjem, Valentina Robiglio and Raphael (Rapha) Tsanga – three of our regional focal points – brought to light some of the challenges and opportunities of engaging diverse, and sometimes conflicting, stakeholders across Africa and Latin America.

Through their conversation – and especially some of the provocative statements the three made – several pieces of advice emerged for those planning to implement future projects:

Map roles, interests and power
Go beyond representation
Balance law and legitimacy
Acknowledge ‘difficult’ actors
Create alternatives for youth
Co-create a shared vision
Recognize the agency of ILM practitioners
View multi-stakeholder platforms as processes, not events
Invest in invisible work

Listen in on the full conversation now, or skip to the highlights below.

Map roles, interests and power

The first step in stakeholder engagement is to map who the stakeholders are. Farmers, cooperatives, local leaders, government agencies, private companies, and donors – all bring different priorities. But identification alone is not enough.

You identify who the stakeholders are, but it does not stop there. You need to move a step further by identifying what their role is in that given landscape, why they are interested, and how much they can influence things positively or negatively.
– Divine Foundjem

Stakeholders may seek livelihoods, resources, political influence or conservation outcomes. Their power can be enabling or obstructive.

Divine pointed to North Cameroon as an example: “We have in the north the effect of Boko Haram. These actors stop development partners from going to the field because they may easily be kidnapped. Those are powerful actors – but can you bring them to the table?”

Go beyond representation

Stakeholder engagement risks becoming a “checklist exercise” – inviting one farmer, one woman, or one minority representative to tick a box.

They say, ‘Okay, farmers are represented. The minority groups are represented.” But it’s just a checklist. They don’t really care whether that category of persons has the decision-making power to say things that they really want to say.
– Divine Foundjem

Real inclusivity means active participation:

Less powerful groups need empowerment to speak and relay messages back to their communities. Rapha cited the example of including informal loggers: “This inclusion is a long-term strategy. It is a process that requires tact and support. At first, these actors couldn’t even speak in front of the Director of Forests. As facilitators, we helped them build confidence, learn from others in the region, and engage in dialogue that led to changes in regulation.”

Less powerful groups need capacity-building to speak and to carry messages back to their communities.
More powerful actors need support to accept the participation of minorities and listen without feeling their authority is threatened.

As Valentina noted: “The important thing is that the powerful people have to listen. That is the most challenging – because sometimes they feel that by listening, they are losing their power.”

Balance law and legitimacy

Rapha reminded us that local realities often clash with formal law: “Most of the actors in the landscapes where we are working are local communities, operating informally in fishing, hunting or logging – and most of the time they are treated like criminals. In my perspective, they are not.”

He stressed the need to distinguish between legal, illegal, legitimate and illegitimate.

Sometimes the law doesn’t capture the local dynamic. Encroachment may be informal and illegal, but actually legitimate. That legitimacy organizes the way people intervene in the landscape.
– Rapha Tsanga

He cited an example of informal logging in the Congo Basin which illustrates how inclusion over time can shift dynamics: “For the government, informal logging was illegal. But we called it informal because we didn’t want to treat these actors as criminals. If they are not criminals, they can sit around the table, talk to the government, discuss regulations, and gradually operate legally.”

This nuance is crucial in designing multi-stakeholder fora where rules must balance conservation, livelihoods and legitimacy.

Acknowledge ‘difficult’ actors

What about groups that cannot be brought to the table – armed rebels, narco-traffickers, or criminal gangs?

“This is the elephant in the room,” Rapha said. “If we take them on board, we create conflict with the government. If we do not, we can’t implement ILM practices because they are the ones controlling the landscape.”

ILM projects can play a stabilizing role in violent conflict settings:

In Burkina Faso, projects created social centres where young people play football or watch films, helping build trust and exchange information about external threats.
In Colombia, initial stakeholder mapping omitted mention of armed groups – but facilitators used background knowledge to ensure their influence was acknowledged, even if they weren’t physically present.
In Central African Republic, projects have worked indirectly through humanitarian organizations and the UN.

As Rapha emphasized, “ILM cannot solve all the problems, but at least it can maintain a kind of balance. Without ILM, the situation would probably be worse.”

Create alternatives for youth

Armed groups and war economies often attract young people with the promise of money and influence. ILM projects must therefore create livelihood alternatives.

Sometimes it is easier for a young person to join an armed group. When you have a weapon, you can get money. The idea is to create alternative activities, income-generating projects, so that they don’t have to join.
– Rapha Tsanga

This requires coalitions of actors – governments, donors, civil society – complementing project-level initiatives.

Co-create a shared vision

ILM can support the creation of a shared vision.

It’s important that those who sit together in a platform to manage a landscape develop a common vision of where they want to go. People come first. Landscapes are about human beings.
– Divine Foundjem

This vision cannot be forged in a single meeting. It is a long-term process of negotiation, adaptation and trust-building – but one that is essential for resilience.

Recognize the agency of ILM practitioners

The conversation then turned to the practitioners themselves. They are not neutral observers; they are facilitators, brokers, and often the only actors trusted enough to mediate.

Rapha recalled the emergence of forest certification in the Congo Basin nearly two decades ago: “The government allocated logging concessions on the map, everything was fine on paper. But logging companies had to deal with local communities who were hunting and fishing in the concessions. One of the solutions was to put in place multi-stakeholder platforms to discuss rights, what was legal, what was forbidden, and to adapt strategies iteratively when problems arose.”

He stressed that ILM practitioners have a critical role in organizing such processes at the landscape level, while also recognizing when to bring in state officials who ultimately hold policymaking authority.

Valentina underscored the importance of trust: “It’s important for practitioners to build trust so that all stakeholders recognize their facilitating role and so can genuinely broker dialogue.”

When people trust that the process can lead to change, even if it takes time, they are willing to sit at the table.
– Valentina Robiglio

Divine expanded: “In contexts of weak governance, farmers often don’t trust government officials to mediate conflicts. They believe officials can be corrupted by richer actors. That is where we, as practitioners, have to come in – to facilitate trust building, to guarantee trust, to create spaces where actors can see for themselves what is right and wrong.”

View multi-stakeholder platforms as processes, not events

Meetings are just one element in a much broader journey, as Valentina pointed out: “What’s important is to remember that multi-stakeholder platforms are not just about meetings. They are long-term processes – bilateral engagements, informal meetings, listening, and building enabling conditions. Meetings are just the visible tip of the iceberg.”

Rapha was clear about the proportion of effort required:

Ninety percent of the work is the invisible part – informal meetings, bilateral conversations, listening, understanding local dynamics. Only once that groundwork is done can you organize big meetings with nice pictures. Those are the visible end stage, but the real process is long, patient, invisible work.”
Rapha Tsanga

Invest in invisible work

Divine raised a challenge: “Donors often measure processes by the number of formal meetings held. But the groundwork – the informal meetings, negotiations, and mediation – is what really matters. It is resource-intensive, but it is what builds trust and makes change possible.”

Donors often complain about ‘transaction costs’. But really, transactions – the informal meetings, the shared meals, the building of trust and familiarity, the listening – are what results in successful ILM. Transaction costs shouldn’t be eschewed, but rather, invested in. High transaction costs are, in our view, an indicator of likely ILM success.”
Kim Geheb, Landscapes For Our Future Central Component Coordinator

Conclusion: stakeholder engagement is the backbone of ILM

Stakeholder engagement is not a technical step but the very backbone of Integrated Landscape Management. It requires patience, humility, courage and creativity – particularly in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

As the examples from Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Colombia and the Congo Basin show, meaningful engagement not only builds governance but also contributes to peace, stability and resilience.

Through these insights, we’re continuing to refine and demonstrate ILM practice – showing that inclusive, negotiated and adaptive engagement is the path to sustainable and just landscapes.

Newsletters

Newsletter #11 | July 2025

Integrated Landscape Management in the real world: We’ve been visiting; you’ve been talking; we’ve all been learning.

*Behind the scenes: Khalil Walji and Kim Geheb flaunt Papua New Guinean headgear as they meet with Sam Moko on their recent learning visit to Enga Province, PNG.*

We’ve been travelling. And learning. A lot! Since our Southeast Asian regional summit late last year, we’ve visited the bulk of Landscapes For Our Future’s 22 projects in an effort to glean those insights that are not evident when analyzing single projects. As most of you’re aware, since you’re such key parts of it, we’re documenting your hard-earned experience for the benefit of future practitioners and policymakers who want to design and implement Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) interventions.

The final results are not yet in, but we’re happy to share some initial feedback. In this newsletter:

? Divine Foundjem reflects on some innovative strategies in Francophone Africa

? Peter Cronkleton and Natalia Cisneros provide insights on their learnings from Latin America

? Kim Geheb contemplates whether ILM can be a vehicle for peace in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere

? Our SE Asian colleagues reveal their top ILM success factors

? Our Latin American and Caribbean project teams illustrate the role of iterative learning and adaptation in politically sensitive, ecologically important, and operationally challenging settings.

These visits showed us that there’s still so much to uncover. With the right approaches, the right questions, and the right space for reflection, people begin to see things differently.”
– Divine Foundjem, LFF focal point for Francophone Africa

UPDATES

Insights from our lesson learning process

First: thank you to each of the country teams for being such wonderful hosts and collaborators! You already know that our visits were not business as usual. They were structured moments for real reflection, where we sat down together over long and intense days to look back at what had been done in the landscapes and ask key questions:

What have we learned?
What worked well?
What didn’t work as expected?
And what does that tell us about how to improve integrated landscape management?

In his blog post, Divine Foundjem shares how teams used LFF’s framework of six ILM dimensions to uncover valuable insights — from the role of decentralised planning in Senegal to the unexpected impact of football matches as a conflict resolution tool in Burkina Faso.

Learn from Francophone Africa

In Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay, our team found projects making real strides in bringing diverse stakeholders together and grounding Integrated Landscape Management in concrete local actions. Yet challenges remain around scaling up and sustaining this momentum over time. These reflections offer practical lessons for landscape practitioners and donors everywhere – insights that are vital as we shape the next generation of landscape programmes.

Learn from Latin America

REFLECTIONS FROM THE FIELD

How has iterative learning and adaptation manifested across LFF landscapes?

Iterative learning is emerging as a powerful driver of action across LFF landscapes by enabling projects to remain responsive, adaptive, and grounded in local realities. Rather than relying on rigid plans, project teams embrace flexible, feedback-driven approaches that allow them to learn alongside communities, adjust strategies based on real-time insights, and co-create solutions that are both effective and locally legitimate. Whether through peer exchanges in Ecuador, participatory experiments in Colombia, or adaptive planning in Paraguay, this continuous learning process is helping overcome political, ecological, and social challenges, translating reflection into tangible progress on the ground.

Can ILM be a vehicle for peace?

In the YouTube video above, Jacky Yalanda tells his story. A former hireman reputed to have killed dozens of people, he now works for the PNG Forestry Department, which is planting 100,000 trees in the Kenda Valley, where fighting has depopulated the land.

In Papua New Guinea’s remote and rugged landscapes, local conflicts can threaten both people’s safety and the natural resources they depend on. Yet ILM approaches can help build the trust and collaboration needed to reduce tensions and unlock progress for people and nature alike.

These clans are tight. The social capital of Enga province is immense. But this can also lead to problems. As one of my colleagues here put it, ‘When you attack one [clan member], you attack us all. Even if I do not agree with your perspective, I will come to fight alongside you.’ And that’s the thing. The Engans fight a lot.”
– Kim Geheb

Kim Geheb’s latest blog explore how our project in PNG is navigating these challenges – and what lessons this holds for landscape practitioners and donors working in fragile contexts.

Read the blog

PUBLICATIONS

What does it take to make ILM work in practice? Lessons from SE Asia

Practitioners and donors working across Southeast Asia gathered in Bangkok late last year with a shared purpose: to learn, unlearn, and exchange honest reflections. Together, we unpacked what drives success, what holds progress back, and what lessons can guide us into the future.

These insights are highly relevant for implementors worldwide, whether those in our Landscapes For Our Future programme or those shaping new initiatives. Download the illustrated report for key takeaways that can inform your own landscape efforts.

Download the report

Knowledge

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South America and the Caribbean

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