A Governance Approach to Landscape Restoration
Forest landscape restoration is all about who decides on what to be restored, how, and for what purpose. It does not aim to ‘just’ restore forests, but to restore landscapes as a whole. Not only by making use of cleverly designed restoration plans which fit in the biophysical characteristics of the landscapes, but also by valuing the interests of a landscape’s inhabitants, users or ‘stakeholders’. Landscapes usually accomodate many different stakeholders, each of which having their own interests, contributions and priorities. It is the way in which these stakeholders interact, negotiate, and make landscape decisions which we call landscape governance.
Landscape governance is crucial to forest landscape restoration, to make sure that the restoration outcomes meet the interests of its inhabitants and users, and have it sustained. Landscape governance is not just a checklist that one can go through, but it is a process of stakeholder consultation, deliberation, negotiation, and making well informed choices. Such a process needs to be carefully facilitated, to make sure that its outcome is satisfying to the needs and interests of the stakeholders involved.
To help landscape stakeholders to initiate and facilitate such a process and bring it to a satisfying outcome, the Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation, supported by the World Resources Institute, developed a framework for assessing ‘landscape governance capacities’. The framework enables landscape stakeholders to collectively assess their existing landscape governance capacities, identify potential capacity gaps, and develop a roadmap for enhancing the capacities they want to strengthen.