The aim of this chapter is to take stock of forest landscape restoration in Central Africa. First, we clarify the concept of landscape restoration. Second, we present some cases illustrative of forest landscape restoration in Central Africa. Finally, we cover the question of governance and then offer some conclusions.
Tag: governance
The Land Gap Report 2022
This Land Gap Report shows how countries’ climate plans, if implemented, will increase the aggregate demands made on land. The report quantifies the aggregate demand for land and land-use change to address climate mitigation in the climate pledges submitted by Parties to the UNFCCC. A key finding is that countries’ climate pledges assume that almost 1.2 billion hectares of land can be prioritized for carbon dioxide removal.
What is forest tenure (in)security? Insights from participatory perspective analysis
Over the past two decades, growing recognition of forest-based Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) sparked forest tenure reforms to formalize IP and LC rights to forests and forest lands through a variety of mechanisms. Nevertheless, tenure security, an intended objective of such reforms, has received less attention, despite being integral to the life and livelihoods of IPs and LCs and important for forests. Formal rights – a title, certificate or contract – is often used as an inadequate proxy for security, though the need to understand perception has been increasingly recognized. But understanding perceptions around tenure (in)security also raises the challenge of unpacking what people mean when they say they perceive tenure to be secure or insecure. This article explores perceptions of tenure (in)security using a novel approach – Participatory Prospective Analysis (PPA), a multi-stakeholder foresight scenario-building method. The research explores tenure security scenarios in Indonesia, Peru and Uganda drawing on results from a series of workshops implemented in 2015 and 2016 primarily at subnational level, with 177 government officials, practitioners and members of community level organizations involved in forest tenure reforms. Four women-only workshops (three subnational and one national) were organized in Peru and Uganda with an additional 87 participants. The results demonstrate the immense depth and complexity of tenure security and insecurity perceptions and the interplay of multiple factors driving toward and away from desirable futures. The method also demonstrates the benefits of PPA for bringing together different perspectives and promoting mutual understanding without reducing complexity. The article contributes to efforts to find common ground not only around how tenure (in)security is defined but also how it is being assessed; and points to the need to embrace more holistic approaches in practice for the future of forest dependent communities and forest landscapes.
Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services from Indonesia’s Remaining Forests
With 120 million hectares of forest area, Indonesia has the third largest area of biodiversity-rich tropical forests in the world, and it is well-known as a mega-biodiversity country. However, in 2020, only 70 percent of this area remained forested. The government has consistently undertaken corrective actions to achieve Sustainable Development Goal targets, with a special focus on Goals #1 (no poverty), #2 (zero hunger), #3 (good health and well-being), #7 (affordable and clean energy), #8 (decent work and economic growth), #13 (climate action), and #15 (life on land). Good environmental governance is a core concept in Indonesia’s forest management and includes mainstreaming ecosystem services as a framework for sustainable forest management. This paper analyzes efforts to mainstream Indonesia’s remaining forest ecosystem services. We review the state of Indonesia’s forests in relation to deforestation dynamics, climate change, and ecosystem service potential and options and provide recommendations for mainstreaming strategies regarding aspects of policy, planning, and implementation, as well as the process of the articulation of ecosystem services and their alternative funding.
Revisiting Baru Pelepat
This chapter by Yuliani et al. begins with a brief description of the Adaptive Collaborative Management process that occurred in the early 2000s in the village of Baru Pelepat in Jambi province, Indonesia – a process facilitated by these authors. After a brief introduction to the community itself, Yuliani et al. launch into a description of the bottom-up process that resulted in local communities getting legal rights to manage a special forest area near their community, an area that had been part of Indonesia’s forest estate. After explaining their methods, they provide the results of a land use land cover change study, which clarifies the condition of that forest, as well as the surrounding countryside, as it has changed over the previous two decades. Building on their long-term involvement in the community, they examine decision-making, inclusivity and conflict management in the community; and then show how important decisions were made, based on ongoing community monitoring. The roles of gender, economics, biodiversity and collective action are further discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the critical role of learning, in both the successes the community experienced and the skills that remain.
Towards Indonesian carbon market: Input from REDD+ projects
Key messages
- REDD+ projects in Indonesia are commercial ‘heavyweights’ in global voluntary carbon markets and among the largest suppliers of carbon offset credits in the world despite only a few of them operating in such markets.
- REDD+ projects employ diverse approaches to secure financing (ranging from direct carbon offset sales to donor aid and donations). They offer a range of activities to achieve their conservation and rural development objectives, mostly tailored to local contexts.
- Legislation to support a domestic carbon market already exists (and continues to emerge). It will be crucial to ensure the market is designed in a way that maximizes benefits for all stakeholders, and ensures REDD+ projects continue to play a key role in mitigating climate change.
The power of possibility in landscape governance: Multiple lives of participatory action research in Kajang, Sulawesi
In 2016, Indigenous communities began to gain access to land rights in Indonesia’s vast state forests. The Kajang community of Sulawesi was the first to achieve such legal land status. Kajang also gained attention for its use of PAR to gain consensus across stakeholder groups in securing recognition. The jointly produced local regulation became symbolic for its ability to convene activists and local government, with Kajang Indigenous leaders at the center. This chapter revisits this process and describes two subsequent PAR initiatives aiming to support landscape governance and empower Kajang institutions. The research teams were directly involved in facilitating PAR processes. This team generated data through reflective discussions with each of the main stakeholder groups. Findings show that PAR continued to resonate beyond formal regulatory initiatives, translating into opportunities for pursuing sustainable landscapes. Also critically explored are contradictions and unintended consequences of normative approaches, especially implications for marginalized groups with limited access to land. The chapter thus points to design elements that change over the course of PAR and suggests some grounding principles for charting a course toward sustainable landscapes. Across PAR’s multiple lives described here, stakeholders continue to engage with PAR for its power of possibility.
ACM and Model Forests: A new paradigm for Africa
The chapter documents ACM embeddedness in a Model Forests transformative change attempt to plant the seeds of a collaborative ecological economy in Central Africa. It introduces the forest ‘poverty paradox’ and related challenges for participatory engagements. It then highlights the ‘inversion’ of the African forest economy, criticizing the blindness of environmental ideologies and interventions to that disability and to their responsibility in maintaining conditions of African structural poverty. The chapter explains Africa’s criticality and considers future options from the ground up. The chapter’s central objective is to question and rethink the roles and ambitions of participatory engagements for local democratic governance in Africa, emphasizing the ‘poverty paradox’ and its momentous significance.
Responding to Environmental Issues through Adaptive Collaborative Management: From Forest Communities to Global Actors
Focused on forest management and governance, this book examines two decades of experience with Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM), assessing both its uses and improvements needed to address global environmental issues.
The volume argues that the activation and the empowerment of local peoples are critical to addressing current environmental challenges and that this must be enhanced by linking and extending such stewardship to global and national policymakers and actors on a broader scale. This can be achieved by employing ACM’s participatory approach, characterized by conscious efforts among stakeholders to communicate, collaborate, negotiate and seek out opportunities to learn collectively about the impacts of their action. The case studies presented here reflect decades of experience working with forest communities in three Indonesian Islands and four African countries. Researchers and practitioners who participated in CIFOR’s early ACM work had the rare opportunity to return to their research sites decades later to see what has happened. These authors reflect critically on their own experience and local site conditions to glean insights that guide us in more effectively addressing climate change and other forest-related challenges. They showcase how global and regional actors will have to work more closely with smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, recognizing the key local roles in forest stewardship.
This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development, natural resource management and development studies more broadly.
The politics of adaptiveness in agroecosystems and its role in transformations to sustainable food systems
Food systems are responsible for pushing human resource use past three thresholds of safe planetary operating space, yet the potential of agroecosystems to contribute to sustainability of food systems when managed for multiple benefits is underexplored. This gap has led to a call for food systems transformation. Previous reviews have acknowledged that governance of food systems transformations is not well understood. The aim of this review is to examine the challenges to transformative governance of agroecosystems, and the potential to apply existing paradigms of adaptiveness in agroecosystems for this transformation. Agricultural production landscapes have been found to be a key level of governance for realizing sustainability transformations of food systems and the landscape concept has been a key paradigm for managing multiple social and ecological objectives at a landscape scale. An examination of the landscape concept using five transformative governance characteristics and applying the earth system governance research lenses illustrated two key areas for further investigation and action for transformative governance. The first is landscape design for continuous social and ecological changes and evolving understandings of sustainability, and the second is the allocation of landscape costs, rights and benefits in present and future decision-making and among human and non-human entities. Managing the pluralistic diversities inherent to agroecosystems will be a key dynamic important to governance and policy for food systems transformations.