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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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Communities at the heart of conservation: Lessons from Laos

In the rugged landscapes of northern Laos, conservation is not only about protecting forests and wildlife within park boundaries. It is about forging, maintaining and deepening partnerships with the people who live in and around those landscapes.
The Khmu village of Ban Son Koua, on the edge of the Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park in northern Laos. The villages around this mountainous national park are home to a range of minority ethnic groups with a history of using the forest resources for sustenance and livelihoods. Photography by Dominique le Roux.

For WCS Laos, the lead implementor on the Ecosystem conservation through integrated landscape management in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (ECILL) project, stakeholder engagement has proven to be the decisive factor in whether conservation efforts succeed or fail.

In the video below, Ben Swanepoel, a programme leader with WCS, gives us some insight into exactly what that looks like on the ground.

The communities themselves are going to be creating the success or failure of the protected area — not our good deeds inside the protected area.

Ben Swanepoel, a programme leader with WCS

From fragmented programmes to integration

WCS Laos has not always worked this way. Ben recalls earlier years when efforts were split into separate programmes: one focused on law enforcement, another on outreach, and still others on ecotourism. Each had merit, but their impact was limited.

“They had marginal success,” he reflects. “The only time we can actually demonstrate a genuine success — something we can measure — is when we put all of this together.”

This insight has led to a new way of working. Now, conservation agreements are accompanied by multiple, interconnected teams: monitoring, livelihood development, stakeholder engagement, land-use planning, and integrated management. Together, they form a comprehensive strategy that addresses the complexity of the landscape.

Ben is convinced: “Integrated is just the right approach for a protected area like this.”

Shifting the balance of responsibility

What makes this integrated approach particularly powerful in Laos is the shift in who drives conservation success. In some contexts, conservation has been about fencing off land and keeping people out. In Ben’s experience, such models are not only unrealistic but counterproductive.

In contrast, the Laos project demonstrates that when communities are given a genuine stake in conservation — backed by economic opportunities, clear agreements, and accountability mechanisms — they become the decisive actors.

“It’s completely the other way around,” Ben says. “NEPL MU are actually going to the community and saying: how can we involve you in the conservation here? It’s the communities themselves that are going to create success.”

Coffee as a catalyst for change

One of the most striking examples comes from an initiative with five villages bordering a protected area. As part of the Ecosystem conservation through integrated landscape management in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (ECILL) project, with the leadership of the Nam Et–Phou Louey Management Unit (NEPL MU), WCS and its partners worked with 80 households to introduce coffee as a viable livelihood alternative. Coffee offered much higher returns and, importantly, it was linked directly to conservation agreements.

Households signing up to grow coffee also committed to refraining from hunting and other unsustainable activities. These agreements came with clear monitoring systems and penalties, ensuring accountability while offering tangible benefits.

“By doing that,” Ben explains, “the NEPL MU has signed conservation agreements. Everybody who wanted to do coffee has signed up, because they know they’ll earn more from this. And in return, they agree to stop hunting.”

This approach shows how carefully designed livelihood interventions can align community wellbeing with conservation objectives, creating a win–win scenario.

Lessons for Integrated Landscape Management

The experience in Laos offers valuable lessons for other projects in the Landscapes For Our Future programme and beyond:

  • Livelihoods as leverage: Alternative income opportunities must be meaningful and profitable enough to motivate change. Coffee, in this case, provided a clear pathway.
  • Agreements with accountability: Conservation commitments tied to real incentives — and backed by monitoring — strengthen trust while ensuring compliance.
  • Integration over fragmentation: Conservation gains are maximised when law enforcement, outreach, livelihoods, and land-use planning are part of a single, coherent strategy.
  • Communities as co-managers: True success comes when local people are not peripheral, but central, to the design and delivery of conservation outcomes.

These insights reinforce a central principle of integrated landscape management: sustainable change cannot be achieved through isolated interventions. It requires collaboration, alignment, and above all, a recognition that landscapes belong to the people who live within them.

As the WCS Laos experience shows, when communities see both the benefits and the responsibilities of conservation, they step forward not as passive recipients but as active stewards of the landscape. And it is in their hands that the future of these protected areas will be secured.

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:

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.

Facilitating with respect: Lessons from Zimbabwe’s Lowveld

When Lemson Betha first arrived in Zimbabwe’s southeast Lowveld to work as a facilitator for SAT-WILD, he was stepping into unfamiliar territory: he hadn’t grown up in the region, and didn’t speak the local language. But he knew that building trust would be the foundation of any successful work.

Today, the Sustainable Integrated Landscape Management in the Gonarezhou National Park and surrounding communities project is regarded as one of the strongest role models amongst the 22 projects in the Landscapes For Our Future programme, not because SAT-WILD and the other project partners had all the answers from the start, but because they have remained committed to facilitation, co-creation, and adaptive learning. Lemson’s reflections below offer invaluable guidance for anyone working with communities on complex, long-term landscape challenges.

Learn directly from Lemson or read the summary below:

Begin with respect

For Lemson, the starting point is simple but powerful: treat communities as equals. “View them as people with the same potential and capability in achieving goals,” he says. Respect isn’t just an attitude – it’s also shown through action.

That means recognizing and following local structures. Traditional leaders such as chiefs and headmen hold important roles, and there are established cultural protocols for introducing yourself. “If you don’t follow their procedures, you’ll struggle to penetrate those communities.”

Respecting these systems signals humility and seriousness. It opens the door for collaboration rather than confrontation.

Work through local voices

Language can be a barrier – or a bridge. Lemson speaks Ndebele and Shona, but in Gonarezhou most people use Tsonga or Shangaan. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, he teamed up with colleagues from the area who can translate and explain cultural nuances.

Communication, he stresses, isn’t just about words. It’s about ensuring that everyone understands, feels included, and sees themselves in the process. That often requires adapting your methods.

Make it practical and participatory

“We are not there to deliver PowerPoints,” Lemson says with a smile. In communities where abstract diagrams don’t resonate, SAT-WILD uses props and local metaphors.

  • A sponge becomes a model of resilience – it can be squeezed but always bounces back, and it holds water for future use.
  • A three-legged cooking pot illustrates sustainable development: social, environmental, and economic “legs” must all be balanced, while governance provides the base.

By drawing on everyday objects, facilitators turn complex concepts into something tangible, memorable, and actionable. Group work, illustrations, and hands-on activities ensure that knowledge is not just shared but co-created.

Value indigenous knowledge

Too often, practitioners treat communities as “empty jars” to be filled with external expertise. Lemson rejects this model. “They already have water in their jars,” he insists. Communities bring rich indigenous knowledge and lived experience that must be woven together with scientific and technical insights.

By asking “What do you know about this?” facilitators create space for dialogue. That blending of perspectives doesn’t just build better solutions – it builds ownership. And ownership is what makes projects last beyond donor cycles.

Stay flexible

Development timelines are often tight, but rigid schedules rarely work on the ground. Community events, ceremonies, or farming activities may clash with planned workshops. Lemson’s advice: don’t force it.

“Be flexible to change, tailor-make activities to fit into their plans, and work with them,” he says. “We are not at war. We are one big family wanting to achieve greater work in the landscape.”

Facilitate for co-creation

Ultimately, Lemson sees his role not as leading but as facilitating. SAT-WILD doesn’t claim the project as its own. “It’s not our project – it’s their project,” he explains, referring to the communities and other partners, including Malipati Developmentt Trust, Ngwenyeni Community Environment & Development Trust, local Authorities, Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, Manjinji Bosman’s Community Conservation and Tourism Partnership and SAT-WILD “We are just coming as facilitators, working with them.”

That mindset transforms relationships. It shifts from top-down instruction to shared problem-solving. It builds resilience not only in communities but also in the partnerships that support them.

Conclusion: A role model for ILM

For practitioners working in Integrated Landscape Management, Lemson’s advice is clear: respect local structures, adapt communication, make learning practical, value indigenous knowledge, and remain flexible.

It sounds simple – and in many ways it is. But doing these things consistently, with patience and humility, is what allows trust to grow. And trust, as SAT-WILD’s experience shows, is the foundation of lasting change.

Guardians of the green: local stewardship of a global treasure

Mauritius dazzles with emerald peaks and turquoise seas — but its “green” landscapes hide centuries of ecological loss. Nearly 90% of native forests are gone, leaving Mauritians with the urgent responsibility of stewarding biodiversity of global significance.

When you land in Mauritius, the first impression is one of dazzling beauty: emerald mountains rising above a turquoise lagoon, sugarcane swaying in the breeze, and pockets of deep green forest. As you step out of the airport, the first sign that greets you proudly proclaims: “Welcome to Mauritius – a Green Island.” Looking out towards the horizon, all you see are rolling green landscapes stretching to the sea. But it is a trick of the eye: these are not native forests, but vast expanses of sugarcane plantations. The island’s rich natural heritage has been reshaped over centuries, and beneath the surface of this apparent greenness lies a deeper story.

A story of centuries of ecological transformation. Since human arrival, Mauritius has lost almost 90% of its native forests, much of it cleared for sugarcane and settlements. Invasive plants and animals now dominate many landscapes, and the once-thriving populations of endemic species have been reduced to fragile fragments. It is this history that gives urgency to today’s efforts to restore and steward the island’s unique, globally relevant biodiversity.

The Mauritius from Ridge to Reef (R2R) project has taken up this challenge with a holistic vision: linking mountains, rivers, forests, and reefs into one continuous fabric of restoration. From weeding invasive plants on steep slopes, to encouraging community apiculture, to protecting coastal wetlands and coral reefs, the project is premised on the idea that resilience is only possible when land and sea are managed together.

Restoration, however, is not only about plants and trees – it is about people. The conservation space in Mauritius has many actors: NGOs, government departments, and ministries whose mandates sometimes overlap. Collaboration among them must be strengthened. Restoration itself is a natural integrator: degraded land is found on coastal shores, within forests, and across agricultural landscapes. But for these efforts to truly benefit biodiversity, connectivity, and resilience, ecosystems – and the ministries responsible for them – need better integration. 

Recognizing this, CIFOR-ICRAF this past month worked alongside partners to support a consultation workshop for the new Biodiversity Stewardship Platform (BSP). 

Over three dozen participants gathered, representing a rich cross-section of Mauritian society: government ministries, NGOs, research institutions, youth representatives, private sector leaders, and local community organizations. Together, they grappled with a simple but profound question: how can Mauritius move from fragmented projects toward an integrated, long-term platform for stewardship?

The conversations were lively and candid. Stakeholders spoke of the need for a common vision, one that balances conservation with development, and puts equity at the heart of decision-making. Breakout groups wrestled with the design of the BSP — its governance structure, its functions, and how it could build credibility through transparency and inclusive participation. Ideas flowed: a communications hub to tell Mauritius’s biodiversity story; a knowledge-sharing system to capture lessons; and mechanisms for monitoring progress, so that commitments translate into results.

Workshop outcomes

By the close of the workshop, three major outcomes had emerged:

  1. A shared vision for the BSP as a national hub for coordination, learning, and action on biodiversity stewardship.
  2. Agreement on a draft structure, including a steering group and multi-stakeholder working groups to carry forward priority themes.
  3. Commitment to collaboration, with participants voicing readiness to contribute data, align projects, and champion the BSP across their networks.

There was a sense of possibility in the room — that Mauritius, despite its small size, can pioneer innovative governance for restoration and biodiversity.

We cannot afford to work in silos any longer. The Platform is where our efforts will finally meet.

BSP workshop participant

Looking ahead, the BSP will aim to knit together the many threads of biodiversity work across the island. Its ambition is to become a space where government, civil society, communities, and businesses co-create solutions, exchange lessons, and hold each other accountable. If successful, the Platform will not only accelerate restoration outcomes but also embed stewardship into the social fabric of Mauritius – ensuring that the island’s globally important natural heritage is cherished and safeguarded for the world. 

Mauritius’s story, then, is one of both loss and renewal: centuries of degradation now giving rise to bold new approaches. The Ridge to Reef project shows what’s possible in practice; the BSP offers a governance model to sustain it. Together, they chart a hopeful course for an island that has long been defined by its nature, and whose future depends on it.

Observing how iterative learning and adaptation contribute to Integrated Landscape Management

Progress might require a meandering route in politically sensitive, ecologically important, and operationally challenging settings. Recent experiences from our landscapes in Latin America and the Caribbean illustrate how adaptive learning offers a way forward.

Over recent months, the LFF Central Component in Latin America has been collaborating with EU-funded Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) initiatives to gain a deeper understanding of how different dimensions of ILM function in practice, particularly iterative and adaptive learning.

Iterative and adaptive learning are key characteristics of effective ILM initiatives. This is because landscapes are highly complex and dynamic socio-ecological systems with multiple and dynamic interacting elements and a high degree of uncertainty about how they will evolve.

“A socio-ecological system is an integrated system of people and nature, where ecological and social components are interdependent and co-evolve through feedbacks.”

— Elinor Ostrom, 2009

As we described in our Landscapes in Practice guideline, iterative learning is a continuous, cyclical process of learning through action, reflection, and adjustment. It involves testing ideas or strategies, observing the results, gathering feedback, and then refining approaches based on what was learned. Rather than following a fixed plan, iterative learning enables adaptation over time, particularly in complex or dynamic environments. Without iterative learning processes, initiatives can fall into a trap of static planning and top-down technocratic fixes. This process of identifying best practices and improving over time is often described as a ‘learning by doing’ approach.

To encourage ILM proponents to reflect on the role of iterative and adaptive learning in their work, the LFF team has been facilitating reflective activities with these ILM practitioners, supporting them as they learn from their own experiences.

Facilitation has included group exchanges, workshops, bilateral discussions, and peer exchanges across regions.

In November 2024, the Central Component organized an Iterative Learning Webinar, which brought together colleagues from multiple ILM projects, including Paisajes Andinos (Ecuador), Mi Biósfera (Honduras), the OECS-ILM Project (Organization of Eastern Caribbean States), and Paisajes Sostenibles (Colombia).

This gathering focused on knowledge sharing and dialogue among ILM practitioners in the region to highlight practical solutions and approaches for iterative learning and encouraging reflection on governance, institutionalization, and stakeholder engagement for adaptive management.

LFF partners emphasized the critical role of cross-sector partnerships in advancing sustainable landscape outcomes. Speakers stressed that building and maintaining these partnerships – especially across governments, communities, and NGOs – is not always easy, especially amid changing political and financial contexts. Yet, it is precisely this collaborative spirit that enables long-term impact, and landscape approaches are, by nature, long-term investments.

Khalil Walji, representing the LFF Central Component, noted: “Through our Joint Reflection and Learning Missions, we’ve seen firsthand how collaborative learning can lead to significant improvements in land restoration efforts.”

Participants exchanged fresh ideas on innovative strategies to bolster these alliances, such as participatory governance models and capacity-building initiatives, ultimately highlighting the essential role of cooperation in driving sustainable outcomes in landscape management.

The webinar highlighted LFF’s strategy of fostering collaboration among projects to improve practices and outcomes by learning from one another.

A common thread among the experiences was the value of integrating local knowledge into landscape management strategies and giving voice and ownership of the process to local resource managers.  We believe the integration of local knowledge into our practices is essential for achieving sustainability in landscape management.

Lessons from the field: How has adaptation manifested across LFF landscapes?

Ecuador – Paisajes Andinos

During our March (2025) visit to Ecuador, the Paisajes Andinos team recounted the approach they had used to support community conservation of a threatened páramo landscape in the Simiátug parish. Rather than imposing a predefined conservation model, the project supported local stakeholders in exploring governance mechanisms through exchange visits and dialogues. They had initiated a process where communities visited others to learn from their experiences, which helped target communities surrounding the paramo learn from their experiences. This, in turn, enabled the communities surrounding the targeted páramos to identify potential governance mechanisms that conserved resources and secured rights. The project had also invested time in building trust between the communities and Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment. As a result, the communities had decided that a mechanism known as a Hydrological Protection Area was best suited to their needs and had joined local and national government, NGOs and FAO in a collaborative effort to demarcate and develop it.

Colombia – Paisajes Sostenibles

During an April 2025 learning mission to Santa Marta, Colombia, staff from the Paisajes Sostenibles partner INVEMAR recounted their experience working with fisherfolk in the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta (CGSM). In response to observed declines in the blue crab stock due to overfishing, technicians introduced innovative traps that included openings allowing juvenile crabs to escape. During monitoring visits, the technicians noticed that many fishers had blocked the openings and continued harvesting crabs regardless of the stage of growth. As a result, the INVEMAR technicians changed their strategy and implemented a participatory experiment with fishers to monitor harvests using these innovative traps. Through this process, fishers realized that concentrating only on larger crabs would not diminish their harvest but would ensure more crabs for the future.  Acceptance of the modified traps expanded because fishers not only now saw how they worked but also felt ownership, as this was a solution they had validated.

Brazil-Paraguay – Cerrado Resiliente

During our May 2025 visit to Paraguay, technicians for the CERES (Cerrado Resiliente) project used a flexible planning approach that allowed them to facilitate iterative learning cycles with stakeholders in the Agua Dulce zone around the Monumento Natural Cerro Chovoreca. The project’s initial proposals (e.g., formal biological corridors) had proven unviable due to conflicting interests among stakeholders. Rather than insisting on these original ideas, the project shifted focus to socializing the idea of connectivity through maps and dialogue, gaining legitimacy without resistance. Through this process, they were able to aggregate local interest around a strategy to demarcate the Cerro Chovoreca conservation area, which would allow local landowners to also clarify their property boundaries. This reframing helped shift attention from a potentially divisive intervention to a collaborative vision of landscape governance. Collaboration among government agencies, local communities, the private sector and NGOs resulted in the institutionalization of landscape governance in the frontier area. In short, adaptive learning ensured progress in a politically sensitive, ecologically important, and operationally challenging setting.

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.

Learn more

Landscapes in Practice: Iterative learning and adaptation

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.
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Landscapes in Practice: Iterative learning and 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).
LIP Iterative Learning & Adaptation 240905Download

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 will also synthesize 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.

Key messages

  • Iterative and adaptive learning are seen as key characteristics of effective Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) initiatives, yet ILM implementers may need support to operationalize iterative learning and adaptation in their programmes.
  • Given that landscapes are highly complex and dynamic socio-ecological systems fraught with uncertainty over how they function, interact and react, stakeholders involved in management should adopt a ‘learning by doing’ approach to identify best practices and improve over time.
  • Adaptive management is an approach that treats management as an experiment that tests interventions based on available information, and evaluates outcomes to adjust future management decisions and actions.
  • By convening stakeholders to work together towards a common goal (to collaborate), and by promoting social learning (developing a shared understanding within groups), ILM facilitators can encourage an iterative approach to planning and decision-making to better manage complexity in a changing world with many unknowns.
  • There are four steps that can assist in operationalizing this concept in ILM: stakeholder engagement, problem/objective definition, action planning, and monitoring/reflection (then back to action).
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Evidence from a contested landscape in Ghana

From conflict to collaboration through inclusive landscape governance: in this new paper, James Reed and fellow authors describe an engagement and visioning experience in Northern Ghana that holds lessons for ILM practitioners in so many other landscapes.

Donkey transportation in Northern Ghana.
 
Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR

These engagement processes enabled stakeholders to reflect on their contributions and the historical and contemporary challenges obstructing landscape resilience and sustainability. 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.

Reed et Al.

The Western Wildlife Corridor (WWC) in Ghana’s Northern Savannah ecological zone is a contested landscape where efforts to reverse widespread environmental degradation often conflict with local livelihood concerns and broader development objectives. Despite policy measures to devolve natural resource decision-making authority, poor environmental management, persistent socioeconomic challenges, and increasingly limited livelihood op- portunities for people living within the corridor prevail. This study investigates environmental degradation in the WWC and natural resource governance using information on stakeholder perceptions from stakeholder work- shops, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews. We also explore how natural resource management might be strengthened to better deliver social, economic, and environmental goals. We found that despite a history of contestation, stakeholders were able to agree upon specific issues of common concern and generate a collaborative vision for the WWC landscape. Transitioning toward such a vision requires significant investment in strengthening current governance structures and building natural resource management capacity within the corridor and beyond. Furthermore, persistent challenges of conflicting stakeholder objectives and issues related to coordination, corruption, and non-inclusion in decision-making about natural resources must be addressed to advance progress. Stakeholders were able to formulate specific recommendations and a participatory theory of change to inform the development of a sustainable landscape management plan and future evidence-based policy that could steer the WWC toward a more resilient and multifunctional system that equitably supports livelihoods, biodiversity, and wider economic development. The methods for inclusive engagement in environmental decision-making are extrapolatable to other contexts facing similar social-environmental challenges.

Moreover, sector-specific discussions and group negotiations helped formulate concrete short-, mid-, and long-term objectives and specific actions, interventions, and a suite of potential solutions to current barriers that combined could help to reorient and transform the governance and management of the WWC. These recommendations enabled us to generate a working theory of change for the WWC landscape that will be shared and validated with a broader group of stakeholders, including those not present at the workshops.

Reed et al.
Download the paper

The Centrality of Power

An at-a-glance summary of a session at the global summit that explored the issue of power within Integrated Landscape Management.

One of the sessions at our recent global summit looked at the the issue of power within Integrated Landscape Management. As we know, power dynamics between different groups, including genders, ethnicities, education levels, and professions, significantly impact land use. Here, I summarize the main points from this excellent session.

↔️ These interactions are instrumental in shaping the landscape we see.

⭕️ 𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲⭕️ As landscape actors, we must recognize our own agency and decide whether to address inequality or remain passive observers.

The session explored three key strategies for empowerment.

1️⃣ Identify stakeholders and understand their sources of power, using tools like a power/influence matrix and net-mapping.

⚒ A power/influence matrix is a classic method to sort out actors in a system and associate them to dimensions of both power, interest, and attitude, helping to navigate the complexities of a social system. (Read the paper, Making Sense of Stakeholder Mapping here)

🛠 A method we have been using in across the Landscapes For Our Future program is Net-Mapping. A highly participatory exercise to understand levels of influence and visualize power between actors, helping to diagnose the political landscape. (Read more about Net-Mapping here)

2️⃣ Recognize power disparities and voicelessness.

3️⃣ Enable empowerment through tailored approaches and strategies, including training, safe spaces, alliances, resource access, and rights, such as legal or cultural rights, that have been historically denied (e.g., women’s land rights).

Empowering others means giving them a voice, enhancing visibility, and fostering innovation and diversity. It’s about intentionally creating safe spaces and using spatial leadership to amplify the voices of the marginalized.

❓ A critical question persists: How do we engage powerful actors in discussions about changing the status quo, especially those who may resist such change and stand to lose power?

📓 Read the article, “Power, politics and participation: Naming the non-technical in multi-stakeholder processes” here.

📝 Read the article, “Navigating power imbalances in landscape governance: a network and influence analysis in southern Zambia” here.

A methods toolbox for integrated landscape approaches

This chapter aims to give guidance for those working within integrated landscape approaches. It suggests key points for consideration to allow those involved to have a better understanding of the landscape context and dynamics.
Read the chapter here
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