Forests Sourcebook - HCV Resource Network

Encourage stakeholder participation. By transcending
political boundaries, landscapes encompass diverse users,
managers, and decision makers. Stakeholder participation
in the landscape approach is important to plan effectively
across the landscape; understand landscape trends; integrate
national, regional, and local perspectives in zoning decisions;
promote the implementation of landscape activities;
seek adoption of plans; and, finally, lay the groundwork for
building in-country resource-management capacity.
Ensure research and management work in concert.
Not all the desired data on the landscape and its resources
will be available in sufficient detail. This is the case around
the world, independent of financial and human resources
available to the management authority. Management
actions for landscape activities should be designed using
existing data but within a learning context such that future
management direction can be improved over time and
updated as new information becomes available. It is beneficial
to invest in prioritizing information and tracking these
variables. Building an information base of these critical
variables over time will facilitate addressing specific issues
and questions that arise.
Use an iterative approach to monitor impacts and
update the process. The approach adopted at the landscape
level needs to be flexible and able to accommodate
new information and changing contexts. This can require
the use of approaches, such as adaptive management (see
note 4.3, Using Adaptive Management to Improve Project
Implementation), that link research and management.
Management plans should be considered living documents,
able to evolve with changing information, environmental
conditions, and monitoring results. Conventionally systematic
plan revisions happen on a periodic basis, usually after
the current plan has been in effect for 5–10 years. During a
plan revision, the entire plan is revisited, allowing for major
revisions and changes to its content and objectives. Adaptive
management, conversely, allows individual components of
the plan to be amended or altered at any time because of
changing resource conditions, social values, improved data,
or in response to monitoring.
As part of the overall process, identifying suitable indicators
and monitoring these interactions (using technological
advances that facilitate continuous and periodic data collection)
will help to fill data gaps during the course of the initiative.
These data will need to be processed and presented
in a manner accessible to stakeholders for updating the
planning and implementation processes and for providing a
better understanding of interactions among the various
land uses and their impacts (see note 4.2, Assessing Outcomes
of Landscape Interventions).
Devolve management to the appropriate levels. A key
principle of the landscape approach for forests is that management
must be devolved to the appropriate level. Decentralization
of decision making and support from national
agencies and institutions is also important for a landscape
approach. Devolution of management and decentralization
of decision making, however, require ensuring accountability
is built into the system and that the system complements
the local context and, where possible, is based on existing
and effective institutional arrangements and structures.
In landscapes where local institutions are characterized
by elite capture, discrimination, or marginalization of vulnerable
groups, the institutional arrangement adopted in
the landscape approach must challenge these constraints
and create a more equitable and participatory system, as
described in box 4.4. New institutional arrangements,
however, can also create new societal problems that may
actually lead to further degradation of natural resources.
Social cohesiveness and cultural norms are critical to fostering
participatory approaches and must be understood
before making assumptions about existing institutional
arrangements.
Strengthen local and government capacity to operate
at a landscape level. Working within a landscape
approach requires skills in facilitation, conflict management
and mediation, consensus development, linking qualitative
and quantitative information, listening, synthesizing, and
adapting ideas. This skill set is neither readily available nor
easily acquired at conventional technical training programs.
These skills also are not readily found in communities that
are hierarchical or have traditionally suppressed the voice of
minorities.
Building government and community capacity to engage
in a landscape approach will be important to make the
process effective, with long-term impacts. Developing the
necessary capacity requires both broadening the skill set and
developing an innovative and feasible method for implementing
the landscape-scale approach.
Develop necessary methods and management systems.
Adaptive and flexible management systems are crucial
to the effective implementation of the landscape approach.
Existing methods must be adapted, or new ones developed,
to, among other things
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