There is increasing recognition of the role of Indigenous and local knowledge systems in sustainable land use and conservation practices. However, the evidence base remains fragmented, while local knowledge remains marginalised in many national biodiversity strategies and development plans. This applies to the Tonga people of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Here, we synthesise existing evidence of Tonga knowledge and practices to explore their potential contribution to the implementation of integrated landscape approaches that aim to incorporate multiple stakeholders’ objectives in landscape-scale management. Based on a semi-systematic literature review, we identify how various dimensions of Tonga knowledge contribute to biodiversity, food security, soil conservation, and other well-being dimensions. Research gaps identified include significantly less documented evidence of Tonga knowledge and practices in Zimbabwe and limited attention to the biophysical impact of local practices on land and natural resources. Furthermore, there is limited attention to the historical processes that have led to the erosion of Tonga local knowledge and the political disempowerment of Tonga knowledge holders. The findings contribute to greater recognition and validation of Tonga local knowledge and practices in natural resource governance, particularly how such knowledge can contribute to integrated landscape governance. Finally, the review helps to define a future research agenda based on the knowledge gaps identified.
Tag: governance
Navigating power imbalances in landscape governance: a network and influence analysis in southern Zambia
Actors engaging in integrated landscape approaches to reconciling conservation and development represent multiple sectors and scales and actors with different powers, resource access, and influence on decision-making. Despite growing acknowledgement, limited evidence exists on the implications of power relations for landscape governance. Therefore, this paper asks why and how different forms of power unfold and affect the functioning of multi-stakeholder platforms in southern Zambia. Social network analysis and a power influence assessment reveal that all actors exercise some form of visible, hidden, or invisible power in different social spaces to influence decision-making or negotiate a new social order. The intersection of customary and state governance reveals that power imbalances are the product of actors’ social belongingness, situatedness, and settlement histories. We conclude that integrated landscape approaches are potentially suited to balance power by triggering new dynamic social spaces for different power holders to engage in landscape decision-making. However, a power analysis before implementing a landscape approach helps better recognise power differentials and create a basis for marginalised actors to participate in decision-making equally. The paper bears relevance beyond the case, as the methods used to unravel power dynamics in contested landscapes are applicable across the tropics where mixed statutory and customary governance arrangements prevail.
The Role of Multistakeholder Platforms in Environmental Governance: Analyzing Stakeholder Perceptions in Kalomo District, Zambia, Using Q-Method
Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) are increasingly applied in environmental governance as institutions to collectively negotiate challenges, opportunities, and policy options in contested landscapes. However, their contributions and effectiveness depend on how stakeholders perceive and frame the role of MSPs in addressing social and environmental challenges. Despite this dependence, stakeholder perceptions of MSPs are currently under-researched. Hence this empirical study carried out in Zambia’s Kalomo District asks: how do stakeholder groups perceive the role of MSPs in addressing landscape challenges, given the context of the dual land tenure system, and what does this imply for the implementation of integrated landscape approaches? This study uses Q-methodology to analyze the perceptions of purposefully selected stakeholders from state institutions, civil society organizations, land users, and others familiar with existing MSPs at the district and village levels. The findings reveal three narratives. The first one presents MSPs as institutions that foster dialogue. The second narrative foregrounds the role of the government and private sector, despite acknowledging the diversity of stakeholders in MSPs. In this narrative, MSPs should focus on supporting market-driven solutions to resolve landscape challenges. The third narrative recognizes power imbalances and considers MSPs as institutions to identify policy gaps and needs. The first two narratives are positioned in Dryzek’s discourse classification as environmental problem-solving, while the third inclines toward green radicalism. Despite this divergence, there was consensus that MSPs have the potential to harmonize policies in a dual governance system and encourage dialogue between stakeholders to reconcile landscape challenges.
Land rights of indigenous peoples and local communities
Countries’ climate mitigation pledges rely on unrealistic amounts of land-based carbon removal, totaling 1.2 billion hectares – an area larger than the United States and four times the size of India. Reforestation is slated for just over half (633 Mhas) and restoration for the rest (551 Mhas). Importantly, most pledges also pay little attention to who is living on, using and managing these lands, much less to existing land rights of Indigenous Peoples (IPs) and local communities (LCs).
Historical precedents are not reassuring. Without an understanding of history and power relations shaping the rights of IPs and LCs to land and territory, any attempt to fulfil these climate pledges is likely to perpetuate injustices. Chapter 4 of the Land Gap Report provides a succinct summary of the evidence of IP and LC dispossession, recognition and ongoing insecurity. It also proposes that the most effective and just way forward is to ensure that indigenous peoples and local communities have legitimate and effective ownership and control of their land. They must also have a strong voice to self-represent and engage on equal terms – ultimately exercising self-determination in the search for sustainable pathways for use of their lands and territories.
For the full report, including references, please see landgap.org
Navigating power in conservation
Conservation research and practice are increasingly engaging with people and drawing on social sciences to improve environmental governance. In doing so, conservation engages with power in many ways, often implicitly. Conservation scientists and practitioners exercise power when dealing with species, people and the environment, and increasingly they are trying to address power relations to ensure effective conservation outcomes (guiding decision-making, understanding conflict, ensuring just policy and management outcomes). However, engagement with power in conservation is often limited or misguided. To address challenges associated with power in conservation, we introduce the four dominant approaches to analyzing power to conservation scientists and practitioners who are less familiar with social theories of power. These include actor-centered, institutional, structural, and, discursive/governmental power. To complement these more common framings of power, we also discuss further approaches, notably non-human and Indigenous perspectives. We illustrate how power operates at different scales and in different contexts, and provide six guiding principles for better consideration of power in conservation research and practice. These include: (1) considering scales and spaces in decision-making, (2) clarifying underlying values and assumptions of actions, (3) recognizing conflicts as manifestations of power dynamics, (4) analyzing who wins and loses in conservation, (5) accounting for power relations in participatory schemes, and, (6) assessing the right to intervene and the consequences of interventions. We hope that a deeper engagement with social theories of power can make conservation and environmental management more effective and just while also improving transdisciplinary research and practice.
A call for a wider perspective on sustainable forestry: Introduction to the Special Issue on The Social Impacts of Logging
Global demand for timber is projected to grow and much of this timber will continue to be sourced from natural forests. As these forests, particularly in the tropics, tend to be inhabited by the world’s most marginalized communities, the social impacts of logging require more attention within policy, practice and research. This Introduction to the Special Issue of International Forestry Review on The Social Impacts of Logging compiles evidence that the overwhelmingly negative social impacts of logging are systemic. As logging companies fail to fulfill their social obligations, and elite capture is common, the extent to which local communities benefit from logging operations is minimal, while long-term, harmful effects on livelihoods, social fabric and safety are severe. Logging operations reinforce and often exacerbate pre-existing inequities, particularly for women and Indigenous people. Weak governance, a lack of transparency and poor participation procedures partially explain this unfavourable situation. However, logging will only achieve better social outcomes if underlying power-imbalances are tackled.
Land Tenure Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa: Interventions in Benin, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe
Since 2000, many African countries have introduced programs aimed at providing smallholder farmers with low-cost certificates for land held un-der customary tenure. Yet there are many contending views and debates on the impact of these land policies and this book reveals how tenure security, agricultural productivity, and social inclusion were affected by the interven-tions. It analyses the results of carefully selected, authoritative studies on in-terventions in Benin, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe and applies a realist synthesis methodology to explore the socio-political and economic contexts. Drawing on these results, the book argues that inadequate attention paid to the core characteristics of rural social systems obscures the benefits of customary tenure while overlooking the scope for reforms to reduce the gaps in social status among members of customary communities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of land manage-ment and use, land and property law, tenure security, agrarian studies, political economy, and sustainable development. It will also appeal to development professionals and policymakers involved in land governance and land policy in Africa.
Mainstreaming revisited: Experiences from eight countries on the role of National Biodiversity Strategies in practice
Global biodiversity targets have not been met due to weak implementation at the national level. National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) are central for mainstreaming biodiversity by translating global ambition into national policies. This study analyzes the practical role of global and national biodiversity agendas. Interviews from France, Germany, Honduras, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Rwanda, and South Africa show that global targets and NBSAPs have raised awareness, mobilized initiatives, mobilized support for implementation, and fostered accountability. Nevertheless, conflicting interests, weak financial support, and poorly integrated institutional and regulatory structures remain challenges to implementation. Levers for harnessing the role of future NBSAPs to achieve the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework are: improving communication; defining concrete measures and clear responsibilities; fostering cross-sectoral commitment; enshrining targets into national laws; ensuring adequate public funding; reforming harmful subsidies; ensuring coordination among sectors and levels of governance; and strengthening accountability frameworks.
Climate Governance and Decentralization in Indonesia
Indonesia represents an interesting case for analysis of the relationship between multi-level governance and climate governance for three main reasons. It is a highly decentralized country; it is a major contributor to land-based greenhouse gas emissions; and it is extremely vulnerable to climate change. The chapter first provides a broad overview on Indonesia’s climate governance in the context of decentralization, and then focuses on sub-national governance of climate change mitigation in the land use sector, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Our research suggests that Indonesia illustrates key advantages of highly decentralized polity structures. Political autonomy has facilitated sub-national climate action through direct engagement of provinces with transnational climate initiatives, and the multiplicity of forums for policymaking has allowed certain provinces to champion sub-national engagement in climate change policy. Decentralization has also facilitated experimental policies in the form of innovative sub-national jurisdictional approaches to climate action in the land use sector. At the same time, peculiarities of the decentralization approach in the land use sector have led to perverse incentives that hamper forest-based climate change mitigation action.
Connected Conservation: Rethinking conservation for a telecoupled world
The convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, widening of wealth inequality, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the urgent need to mobilize change to secure sustainable futures. Centres of tropical biodiversity are a major focus of conservation efforts, delivered in predominantly site-level interventions often incorporating alternative-livelihood provision or poverty-alleviation components. Yet, a focus on site-level intervention is ill-equipped to address the disproportionate role of (often distant) wealth in biodiversity collapse. Further these approaches often attempt to ‘resolve’ local economic poverty in order to safeguard biodiversity in a seemingly virtuous act, potentially overlooking local communities as the living locus of solutions to the biodiversity crisis. We offer Connected Conservation: a dual-branched conservation model that commands novel actions to tackle distant wealth-related drivers of biodiversity decline, while enhancing site-level conservation to empower biodiversity stewards. We synthesize diverse literatures to outline the need for this shift in conservation practice. We identify three dominant negative flows arising in centres of wealth that disproportionately undermine biodiversity, and highlight the three key positive, though marginalized, flows that enhance biodiversity and exist within biocultural centres. Connected Conservation works to amplify the positive flows, and diminish the negative flows, and thereby orientates towards desired states with justice at the centre. We identify connected conservation actions that can be applied and replicated to address the telecoupled, wealth-related reality of biodiversity collapse while empowering contemporary biodiversity stewards. The approach calls for conservation to extend its collaborations across sectors in order to deliver to transformative change.