Collaboration Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Resilient Landscapes (RL)

Typology of relations between communities and conservation areas: A conceptual framework from a comparative study in the Andean Amazon

Key messages

Despite the importance of relations between communities and conservation areas in achieving effective and sustained conservation outcomes, there are few approaches for understanding and addressing the diversity of these relations – including conflict – and for building collaborative processes based on evidence and knowledge management.
To address that gap, this paper presents a typology of relations with two core components: a comparative matrix and a map of driving forces. It was grounded in a comparative study in the Andean Amazon that analysed 16 cases of relations between communities (Indigenous Peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant Peoples) and conservation area managers (and other relevant government agencies).
The comparative matrix describes four types of relations – conflict, collaboration, coexistence and mutualism – across six dimensions and strategies/responses.
The map of driving forces represents how each type of relation is shaped by the interaction among strengthened capacities, alignment of interests and quality of engagement.
These components could provide a basis for participatory diagnostic and planning tools. This, in turn, would enable the different actors in conservation areas to better understand their relations around topics that are important to communities and conservation areas. In this way, they could identify pathways towards more collaborative, inclusive and evidence-based governance.

Comparative analysis of relations between communities and conservation areas in the Andean Amazon: Findings from 16 case studies using a proposed typology of relations

Key messages

This is the second of two briefs that compare 16 cases in the Andean Amazon to understand relations between conservation authorities and communities. The first brief “Typology of relations between communities and conservation areas: A conceptual framework from a comparative study in the Andean Amazon ” builds the conceptual framework; this brief applies it to identify emerging patterns across the cases.
The brief examines four types of relations (conflict and tension, coexistence, collaboration and mutualism) across six dimensions: land/resource rights, livelihoods, decision making, communication, institutional capacity and community capacity/cohesion.
Conflict and tension are most consistently associated with misalignment around land/resource rights and livelihoods, especially where conservation is perceived as restricting access without credible alternatives.
Coexistence is common across the cases but tends to be shallow and fragile, often persisting in contexts of limited engagement and weak institutional capacity.
Collaboration emerges where communities have meaningful roles in decision making and where engagement is structured, routine and linked to concrete actions.
Mutualism is rare and context specific, occurring where conservation reinforces territorial governance, engagement reflects shared authority and capacities on both sides support long-term implementation.
Unpacking relations by analysing their dimensions provides a way to understand the driving forces behind relations: it can inform the design of context-specific strategies and it can guide the targeting of limited resources for the most effective outcomes.
A central practical takeaway is to strengthen the three driving forces together: shared interests (rights/livelihoods), better engagement (influence, transparency, problem solving) and sufficient capacity (to follow through). Dialogue without material change can backfire and create ‘participation fatigue’.

Online Course: Stakeholder Engagement with Evidence

Decision-making in landscapes and socio ecological systems is rarely straightforward. Challenges such as land degradation, competing land uses, and balancing conservation with development exist within constantly shifting policy, social, economic and environmental contexts.
To make decisions that endure, we need the right people at the table and the right evidence in the room. Stakeholder engagement is essential. Decisions made in isolation often fail to take root. By working collaboratively bringing together diverse knowledge, experiences, and perspectives we can build decisions that are more inclusive, evidence-informed, and sustainable.
The Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence-Based Decision-Making (SHARED), developed by CIFOR-ICRAF, offers a valuable framework to guide this process. By combining participatory engagement, systems thinking, and data-driven insights, the SHARED approach supports stakeholders to co-create solutions.

Challenges of collaborative governance peatlands in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Key messages

Bureaucratic inefficiency continues to obstruct collaborative peatland governance, preventing effective stakeholder engagement.
Limited data on peatlands are shared due to information silos, hindering informed decision making.
It is crucial to strengthen local government autonomy for sustainable peatland management, reducing dependence on external facilitators and fostering long-term capacity.

Changing the game: An economy built around stewardship

This chapter begins by reiterating the calls by the Glassgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use and others for more effective attention to climate change. To respond to these calls, we argue that globally we will need to change ‘the game’ from one based on commodification to one that recognizes the systemic nature of human and natural life and builds a caring economy of stewardship. We then summarize elements of the ACM experiences described in this book that demonstrate the need for better cross-scale collaboration as we seek more enduring transformations than we were able to accomplish by focusing only on the local. We examine some of the history, nature and value of what Prabhu has called a Stewardship Economy in the next section, making the point that both the natural and human elements and related relationships among them need greater attention. We include examples of existing stewardship that emerged ‘in passing’ in the ACM experience, despite the earlier absence of explicit attention to such issues. We conclude with the need to develop mechanisms, such as a ‘stewardship dividend’ to reward those who demonstrate such care.

Politics and power in territorial planning: insights from two ‘Ecological-Economic Zoning’ multi-stakeholder processes in the Brazilian Amazon

The use of multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) in territorial planning has gained global popularity. These MSFs aim to bring diverse actors together to collaboratively and equitably develop a plan that assigns optimal land uses to a territory. However, as promoting particular land uses and benefits for some actors often comes at a cost to others, territorial planning MSFs may reproduce or even exacerbate, rather than mitigate, conflicts and asymmetries. We comparatively analyze collaboration, power relations and sustainability goals in the Ecological-Economic Zoning commissions of Acre and Mato Grosso, Brazil, which fall under the same federal mandate but operate in contrasting contexts. We show how territorial planning MSFs have better chances of meeting their goals when they are understood as political processes: in this case, when they emerge from and are nourished by powerful local social-environmental movements and alliances, rather than being technocratic initiatives opposed by powerful local production-business alliances.

Inclusive, Cross-Sectoral and Evidence-Based Decision-Making for Resilience Planning and Decision-Making in a Devolved Context

Successfully achieving the sustainable development goals requires addressing complex, interrelated, wicked problems across multiple scales and contexts and decision-making that tackles nested layers of goals and targets across the interrelated social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The Stakeholder Approach to Risk-informed and Evidence-based Decision-making (SHARED) bridges processes, tools and accessible evidence to support inter-sectoral and multi-stakeholder decision-making and implementation aimed at achieving resilience aspirations and associated investments. Adaptive collaborative management and multiple-loop learning serve as a basis for the systematic approach to institutional learning that supports shifts in underlying institutional understanding and values leading to actionable organisational change. This paper describes a contextual application of tailored technical assistance and institutional support to the Turkana County Government in Kenya, a newly devolved governance structure, under conditions of complexity. The SHARED Turkana County decision case demonstrates how the approach responded to a policy aspiration, resulting in greater and more intentional use of evidence in planning and budget allocations, cross-sectoral and multi-stakeholder partnerships, inclusive and transformative projects and a consultative and evidence-based five-year County Integrated Development Plan.

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