A landscape approach views multiple land-uses in an integrated fashion. Forest and agriculture are thought together, as are the land’s various production and conservation functions.
While there is no single, universal definition, the idea is that a landscape approach brings together previously disjointed – and frequently conflictive – actors, sectors, and objectives such as rural development, food security and forest conservation. It reconciles various land uses, replaces “silos thinking” with an integrated systems perspective, addresses institutional conflicts and promotes synergies, or at least seeks to understand and negotiate trade-offs between conservation and development.
This begs some crucial questions.
- How can a landscape approach be operationalised in practice?
- How can we effectively promote policy coherence between historically antagonistic sectors such as forest conservation (or environment) and agriculture?
- What creative “landscape governance” arrangements could be devised to address such critical institutional and political challenges?
I now utilize my expertise and experience on Sustainable Food Systems and Forests & Biodiversity Conservation to address some of these questions.