Enabling Environment

Innovative policy and market solutions to promote integrated landscape management

Promoting dialogues between landscape leaders, businesses, investors and policymakers that guide sound policy and investment decisions and engage the private sector in multi-stakeholder landscape governance.

Agriculture policy in much of the world is characterized by incentives for land conversion at the cost of the environment. Meanwhile, fractured governance systems for natural resources make coherent planning difficult in many countries. By providing cutting-edge analysis of policy and its implications, we serve as a trusted advisor to local, regional, and national governments.

EcoAgriculture Partners bolsters the presence of community actors and practitioners in the discourse on land management. Through effective consultation and facilitation, we provide a platform for landscape leaders to influence policy at local and national levels.

A critical eye, and powerful voice, for what works

Our policy research focuses on clear, simple shifts governments can make to enable local landscape initiatives to achieve big things. We look for opportunities to magnify the impact of government programs and private investments through strategic policy changes. Our analyses give policy makers the tools they need to make things happen politically.

Giving local land stewards a national voice

The people most affected by bad natural resource policies are often those with least access to existing political systems. The result is policy that ignores the lived reality of millions of people, who face daily threats to their basic human needs. By engaging landscape leaders in the policy conversation, we provide community-driven initiatives the opportunity to influence the policies that affect them most.

Improving private sector participation

Our research has shown that business participation in integrated landscape initiatives is shockingly low: fewer than 8% of initiatives we surveyed in Africa had private sector partners. Yet businesses often have significant impacts on land and natural resource use in landscapes. Their productive participation is critical to the future of the world’s resources, and the economic viability of their operations. We engage businesses with tools that make a clear case for their participation, and then help them engage productively in multi-stakeholder processes. Just as critically, we assist integrated landscape initiatives in recruiting local businesses, and in local entrepreneur support and sustainable product marketing programs.

Get in touch

Contact Seth Shames for more information.