Spatial Tools for Integrated and Inclusive Landscape Governance: Toward a New Research Agenda

Participatory spatial tools—community mapping, PGIS, and others—find increasing resonance among research and non-governmental organizations to make stakeholder claims and community perspectives explicit for more inclusive landscape governance. In this paper, we situate the use of participatory spatial tools in debates on integrated landscape approaches and inclusive development. We show that using such spatial tools is not new but argue that their application for inclusive landscape governance requires a new research agenda that focuses on expanding the scope of application of the tools, improving the inclusivity of the processes, and developing new technologies.

Toward Inclusive Landscape Governance in Contested Landscapes: Exploring the Contribution of Participatory Tools in the Upper Suriname River Basin

Nowadays, tropical forest landscapes are commonly characterized by a multitude of interacting institutions and actors with competing land-use interests. In these settings, indigenous and tribal communities are often marginalized in landscape-level decision making. Inclusive landscape governance inherently integrates diverse knowledge systems, including those of indigenous and tribal communities. Increasingly, geo-information tools are recognized as appropriate tools to integrate diverse interests and legitimize the voices, values, and knowledge of indigenous and tribal communities in landscape governance. In this paper, we present the contribution of the integrated application of three participatory geo-information tools to inclusive landscape governance in the Upper Suriname River Basin in Suriname: (i) Participatory 3-Dimensional Modelling, (ii) the Trade-off! game, and (iii) participatory scenario planning. The participatory 3-dimensional modelling enabled easy participation of community members, documentation of traditional, tacit knowledge and social learning. The Trade-off! game stimulated capacity building and understanding of land-use trade-offs. The participatory scenario planning exercise helped landscape actors to reflect on their own and others’ desired futures while building consensus. Our results emphasize the importance of systematically considering tool attributes and key factors, such as facilitation, for participatory geo-information tools to be optimally used and fit with local contexts. The results also show how combining the tools helped to build momentum and led to diverse yet complementary insights, thereby demonstrating the benefits of integrating multiple tools to address inclusive landscape governance issues.

Landscape Governance and Sustainable Land Restoration: Evidence from Shinyanga, Tanzania

Inclusive land restoration is increasingly considered to be a critical sustainable pathway to the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in developing countries. The literature suggests that good governance practices support successful sustainable natural resource management. The study assesses the role of landscape governance in a long-term thriving forest and landscape restoration project in Shinyanga. We apply the good governance principles, which include participation, representation and legitimacy, actor interactors, equity and fairness, accountability and transparency, and respect for local knowledge. Descriptive methods are used to analyze the data collected through focus group discussions and key informant interviews. The evidence suggests that all of the principles contributed positively to the successful restoration, except for accountability and transparency. Building on local knowledge and institutions, the local rules and norms of restoration constituted the foundation of the success. Equity and empowerment were the least influential attributes due to the exclusion of women in the management of the restoration areas. The actors identified the enhancement of the incentives, equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms, performance, and accountability instruments as the key governance aspects that would benefit land restoration at the landscape level. Furthermore, cohesion and synergies amongst the different actors, the governing structures, and recognizing formal and informal institutions’ interactions are vital determinants of restoration outcomes.

Urban versus Rural? Conflict Lines in Land Use Disputes in the Urban–Rural Fringe Region of Schwerin, Germany

Land use conflicts can present major obstacles to sustainable land management. An accurate understanding of their actor constellations and conflict lines is therefore crucial in developing tools for successful landscape governance. In this context, actors from cities and actors from rural areas are often seen as typical opponents. Hence, the objective of this paper is to analyze the extent to which empirical conflict lines indeed run between urban and rural actors. We applied qualitative text analysis to examine 124 land use conflicts in the urban–rural fringe of Schwerin, Germany, which were identified through semistructured interviews with key land use actors in the region. Results showed that actors from the city and the rural fringe were on opposing sides in almost half of the conflicts. However, they were also frequently in conflict among themselves, and many actor constellations involved actors from other regions or administrative levels. In conclusion, the narrative of the urban–rural dichotomy appears in the empirical data but does not appropriately convey the complexity of the actual conflict lines. The findings of this paper therefore emphasize that it is important to empirically identify the actor constellations in land use conflicts rather than rely on preconceived ideas about typical conflict lines.

Linking multiple values of nature with future impacts: value-based participatory scenario development for sustainable landscape governance

Reaching sustainable and just futures for people and nature requires tackling complex social-ecological challenges across multiple scales, from local to global. Pathways towards such futures are largely driven by people’s decisions and actions, underpinned by multiple types of motivations and values. Thus, understanding the link between potential futures and the values underpinning them represents a key question of current sustainability research, recently embraced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Particularly the understanding of causal chains leading from values to futures across different contexts and scales is vital to identify which sustainability pathways to collectively pursue. In this study, we build on a transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation process in an array of local case studies in protected areas in the Czechia (Central Europe). We apply the Life Framework of Values and the Three Horizons framework in an innovative value-based participatory scenario building process to explore the relationships between (1) multiple types of values, (2) actions taken by different types of stakeholders, and (3) their potential impacts on nature, nature’s contributions to people (including ecosystem services) and good quality of life. The resulting local-scale value-based pathways show the complex relationship between multiple types of values for nature and potential future trajectories. Finally, we reflect on the utility of value-based participatory scenario planning as a means to strengthen sustainable governance. We highlight that if participatory deliberation of values is to support decision-making processes, its design needs to carefully reflect local context and institutional set-up.

Editorial for Special Issue: “Collaboration and MultiStakeholder Engagement in Landscape Governance and Management in Africa: Lessons from Practice“

A multitude of interconnected socio-economic and environmental impacts are emerging across Africa as a result of escalating anthropogenic drivers of global and local change [...]

Making Landscapes of (Be)Longing. Territorialization in the Context of the Eu Development Program Leader in North Rhine-Westphalia

The participation of residents in development processes is a keystone in current rural governance arrangements. The European Union’s rural development program LEADER is an example of this, as it requests local residents to take action in the development process. Similarly, participatory forms of natural and cultural heritage preservation have increased significantly with the aim of revitalizing the socioecological fabric of territories. Following the Anthropology of Policy, the study employs an ethnographic approach to analyze the effects of bio-cultural heritage preservation strategies in the context of LEADER. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered during several field observations and semi-structured interviews in a LEADER region in North Rhine-Westphalia, the article investigates how a local LEADER initiative reconstructs a historical cultural landscape in order to valorize and exploit the biocultural heritage resources of their village. Residents articulate four interrelated senses of (be)longing while (re)making the biocultural heritage: 1) Political claim to use a resource; 2) place attachment; 3) politics of in/exclusion; and 4) nostalgic-utopian longing. As new knowledge actors in landscape governance, residents posit their perceptions, interpretations and valuations of the landscape vis-à-vis institutional actors of landscape governance and negotiate large-scale landscape transformations in the region investigated.