At the Forefront of Landscape Management

Overview

A Decade of Insight and Achievement

EcoAgriculture Partners was founded in 2005 as a mission-driven, non-profit organization inspired by a vision of landscapes around the world that sustain people and sustain the earth, through democratic and inclusive processes of decision-making. We remain committed to that mission and vision today. In our first decade, we applied our integrated landscape lens to policies, financial mechanisms, and market innovations like eco-standards and certifications and payments for ecosystem services.

We worked with communities, primarily in East Africa, but also in Central and South America, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States, to study, test and improve landscape management innovations. And we built a strong international partnership in the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative.

A new global agenda for action

The Sustainable Development Goals and Paris climate accord adopted in 2015 have made it clear: in 2016 and beyond, the world is poised for a dramatic shift from negotiation to action. EcoAgriculture’s new strategy responds by putting innovation for implementation — taking what we’ve learned over the past decade and turning it into tools and insights landscape managers can use — at the heart of our work.

One Mission, Three Themes

Our goal over the next 10 years is to ensure that the essential building blocks for ILM implementation and enabling institutions are established and are generating effective integrated landscape management in hundreds of landscapes around world, enabling countries to meet their climate targets and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. To do so, we will work in three ways:

1. Innovations for Collaborative Landscape Management

We will generate innovations for collaborative landscape management, drawing input and testing our ideas by working in depth with strategic partners and platforms in a small set of landscape initiatives, as well as analyzing experience across initiatives globally.

2. Policy and Market Innovations that Support Integrated Landscape Management

We will generate policy and market innovations that support integrated landscape management, to provide a more enabling environment, through in-depth staff engagement in a few countries and market/policy/finance processes and through comparative analysis of experience globally.

3. Strategic Partnerships to Scale Up Integrated Landscape Management

We will help to scale up ILM globally through strategic partnerships. As a small U.S.-based organization we can only mobilize large-scale impacts in landscapes and enabling institutions around the world by working closely with others. The flagship partnership in this theme is the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature initiative, for which we serve as Secretariat. Other strategic partnerships will be evaluated based on their ability to contribute to scaling ILM and our ability to have impact within them.

Preparing for the Task

To implement this ambitious plan for the coming decade will require a well-organized institution with highly effective, diverse, and talented staff.

Building on Our Strengths

Our successes in our first decade were built by talented, dedicated staff working under constantly changing conditions, as our funding increased, the global understanding of landscape approaches developed, and our partner network expanded dramatically. To achieve our goals in our second decade we must maintain flexibility and accountability through dynamic models of teamwork; strengthen our senior leadership team, especially by adding organizational operations expertise; invest creatively in our human resources to grow our team strategically and retain top talent; and manage the risks and opportunities that come from being a driver of a paradigm shift in sustainable development.