To address the world’s crises on climate, biodiversity and livelihoods, nations and international organizations are launching major policy initiatives.
However, both groups struggle to compromise across priorities and sectors to address the root causes of these problems. A critical solution to this issue is landscape partnerships, which build coalitions and use local knowledge to scale action and achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs).
On December 9th, 2021, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization-North America and EcoAgriculture Partners Roundtable Policy and Services to Support Landscape and Seascape Partnerships highlighted national and international efforts that effectively support landscape partnerships. Panelists from EcoAgriculture Partners, the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the Network for Landscape Conservation and the World Resources Institute shared their experiences from Benin to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The roundtable attracted more than 90 participants from 38 countries, demonstrating the excitement and need for this pressing topic. View the event recording and the notes, tools and resources shared in the chat.
The panel brought together government policymakers, program design experts and landscape practitioners to discuss the types of aid needed and how to ensure external support succeeds. They also explored how to build policy support that positions territorial action as a critical strategy to attain the SDGs.
“We have real opportunities of restoring our ecosystems, mitigating climate change and improving livelihoods by focusing on various aspects of the links of agriculture, climate and landscapes,” said Jocelyn Hall, FAO-North America’s director.
But to work more effectively, she said, landscape partnerships need strong institutional support that helps integrate economic, environmental and social objectives to tackle the underlying causes of degrading landscapes and climate change.
Developing policies to support landscape partnerships
Sara Scherr, President of EcoAgriculture Partners and Chair of 1000 Landscapes for One Billion People, revealed how land policy has historically been fragmented across different ministries, leading to conflicting policies that inhibit the work of landscape partnerships.
Siloed public policies mostly fail to integrate interventions across sectors, Scherr said, but territorial and landscape partnerships can connect approaches to make them work better. She presented a developing collaboration between Columbia and Cornell universities and the Global Livelihood and Landscape Recovery Platform initiative (GALLOP) meant to show policymakers how landscape partnerships can deliver benefits across all SDGs within a given landscape.
She also presented findings from interviews with leading conservation and development organizations that have supported partnerships for decades, including the Global Environment Facility, Conservation International, Rainforest Alliance, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), Australian Landcare, Philippines Landcare, Fundación PRISMA, the Small Grants Programme of UNDP, among many others.
The research found that landscape partnerships most need four kinds of support:
i) Supportive Government Policy: Political support & recognition, land tenure, national government agency coordination;
ii) Technical Services and Local Capacity Development: Facilitation & training services, long-term access to technical and advisory support and data & scientific support;
iii) Financial and Business Services: Mobilizing investment finance, market development for new value in sustainability and funding to support partnerships over the long term;
iv) Connections for Knowledge Exchange and Learning: Communication channels connecting external supporters and buyers and allowing dialogue between policymakers and supportive institutions.
The key ingredients for providing successful external support for landscape partnerships are:
- Commitment to participatory landscape governance
- Public-policy frameworks that explicitly strengthen landscape partnerships
- Long-term support services based on user-defined needs
- Coordination among service providers
- Help to develop the business case for partnerships
- Long-term financing for landscape enabling and asset investments
- Constructive engagement with landscape partnerships’ own networks
Scherr emphasized the importance of integrated strategies to respond to COVID, biodiversity, climate and livelihood needs. Many new programs are emerging to deal with these issues, but these are piecemeal solutions. For instance, the European Green Deal on climate change, the U.S Build Back Better program for COVID recovery and the National Food System Transformation Efforts for food systems.
Yet, these new funding flows and initiatives will only work by placing territorial and landscape stakeholders at the center to solve their unique problems. Sectoral actions will not achieve the results needed; this is the moment to foster interconnected solutions like landscape partnerships to help stakeholders absorb large-scale financing and resources to act for their own territories’ sustainable development.
Benin’s experience integrating policy for landscape development
Luc Gnacadja, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’s (UNDER) chair of the science taskforce and former secretary-general of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), shared his experience in developing landscape policy in Benin. The process through which his country integrated and catalyzed sustainable landscape management policy included:
- Making the case beyond the agriculture and environment ministries;
- National policy dialogue to catalyze policy change;
- Sharing the impacts on the ground; and
- Challenges and obstacles to implementation.
He noted the vulnerability of Benin’s agriculture due to the lack of infrastructure and reliance on rainwater for most smallholder farmers. “The impact of climate change is one of the largest threats to agriculture, which is the greatest economic provider for Benin across GDP and livelihoods,” Gnacadja said. “Public policies should integrate at the national and subnational level in a holistic way to enhance the natural resource of land.”
To foster mutual understanding, they promoted the case to prevent land degradation across different ministries. The government developed a multi-sector and multi-level task force, which spurred national dialogue to understand how to support SDGs in Benin at an institutional and public-finance level.
This dialogue led the Benin government to adopt a decade-long intervention and investment framework strategy from 2018-2027, which centers around four pillars:
- Integrate landscape approaches in agriculture development planning with an investment framework at all levels.
- Eliminate perverse incentives that encourage land degradation.
- Devise positive incentives that reward sustainable landscape management practices and initiatives.
- Figure out how to monitor and ensure accountability.
Benin has since conducted an interim analysis of what the strategy has achieved so far. At a national level, it helped translate the concept of “avoid, reduce and restore” for agriculture ministry planning. It has also resulted in land degradation being adopted into the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and its national adaptation plan. Meanwhile, local leaders have conducted territorial dialogues to design integrated territorial action and map impacts to prioritize public investments.
One of the main challenges is that stakeholders like agricultural land users have a blurry understanding of the interconnectedness of landscapes. Subnational policymakers are new to the approach, so authorities need to strengthen capacity among these stakeholders to develop more landscape partnerships to achieve all of the benefits of sustainable land management.
Another issue is the lack of financial resources. Without financial support, it is challenging to catalyze some partnerships because they need to purchase facilitation, implementation, technical and networking services to do their work.
Gnacadja said the long-term returns for sustainable land management exist. But these returns require that all stakeholders understand how to deal with land degradation holistically and in the long term. Sustainable land management gains also require regulation and policy development to ensure that environmental and social costs are not externalized in land use decision-making.
Landscapes in the United States: Achievements and priorities
Ernest Cook, Director of the Network for Landscape Conservation (NLC), spoke about supporting landscape conservation policy in the U.S. Cook discussed three policy pillars central to U.S. landscape conservation: the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act.
“These initiatives address our most important natural resources: our soils, our waters and our native plants and animals. All of them are best carried out through landscape conservation,” he said. Effective landscape conservation partnerships need stakeholder coordination, dialogues and follow-up activities.
Cook said there is a need for long-term funding for collaboration and short-term financing to implement restoration activities. As one example, more than 90% of small grants program funding requests to the NLC are to fill coordinator roles that support collaborative efforts. “The engine behind landscape partnerships is often money, which requires increased funding through incentives that leverage other government agencies, such as through national, state and local funding frameworks,” Cook said.
Government programs such as the Sentinel Landscape Program also support these activities. Efforts like the Sentinel program support coordination, development and implementation plans as the partnerships progress.
Cook said the U.S. would soon require policies and services that support landscape conservation to mitigate damage from increased climate change-induced flooding. Important elements could include preventive emergency planning, green infrastructure spaces and wetland restoration to reconnect rivers with their floodplains.
Working with Latin America’s policymakers: WRI’s 20×20 Policy Accelerator
Maggie Gonzalez, a research analyst for World Resources Institute‘s Global Restoration Initiative, discussed the 20×20 Initiative, a country-led effort aiming to restore 20 million hectares of degraded land in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2020.
She shared WRI’s approach supporting national restoration policies and sustainable land management. They provide analytical and technical support to different government ministries of the 20×20 initiative member countries.
A key component of their work is the Restoration Policy Accelerator, which WRI launched in 2020 as a collaborative network and capacity-building program for policymakers to solve restoration policy challenges and develop economic incentives. They are currently working with Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Mexico to create a short-term road map towards solutions, as well as knowledge sharing and co-creation that experts share on critical topics to support restoration.
Disproving myths about landscape partnerships
The panel closed by disproving long-held myths about landscape partnerships. First, these organizations are perceived as “weak” and “unproven” groups. In reality, they have proven to be trusted long-term partners that are resilient against political changes for territorial action worldwide. Second, many believe that governments are unwilling to support landscape partnerships. In many cases, though, the reality is that governments are looking for ways to work together with landscape partnerships. Third, people think that finance and economy ministries are not interested in landscapes. But these are often within their mandates, so it simply requires landscape partnership advocates and champions to speak their language to engage them. Finally, people perceive that rural landscapes are disconnected from urban areas when it is universally true that robust urban-rural linkages connect cities to the surrounding countryside.
The panel discussion demonstrated both deep experience and a strong interest in developing landscape policy instruments and mechanisms worldwide. Fortunately, there are already regional networks in existence that leaders can leverage. These lessons will provide the foundation for more effective integrated landscape management interventions.
In the coming months, the collaboration involving EcoAgriculture Partners, Columbia and Cornell universities and the Global Livelihood and Landscape Recovery Platform initiative (GALLOP) will be publishing a whitepaper on this subject. It will integrate the most important lessons learned and recommend developing national policies and services that work through territorial and landscape partnerships. Stay tuned!