Landscape approach

A landscape is not a collection of projects. It is a shared system in which one actor's solution can become another's problem.

The word landscape can make the concept sound simpler than it is. It appears to describe a place: a watershed, a forest frontier, a group of districts or the area surrounding a supply chain. But a landscape approach is not created by drawing a larger boundary around existing projects.

It begins when people recognise that the outcomes they seek are connected across that boundary and cannot be secured by acting farm by farm or organisation by organisation.

A 2014 survey by Milder and colleagues identified 87 integrated landscape initiatives across 33 African countries. The initiatives combined objectives such as agricultural production, conservation, livelihoods and institutional coordination, but they varied widely in governance, finance, monitoring and durability. The survey captured both the promise and the problem.

Many actors were already working at landscape scale, yet calling an initiative integrated did not guarantee that competing objectives were genuinely negotiated or that the institutions needed to sustain cooperation were in place.

A landscape approach is best understood as a governance process for a multifunctional place. The same land may be expected to produce food and export crops, protect biodiversity, store carbon, regulate water, provide fuel and cultural value, support settlements and create income. These functions interact. Expanding irrigation upstream can reduce water downstream.

Protecting a forest without addressing local livelihoods can shift clearing elsewhere. Increasing one commodity's productivity can release land for restoration, or make expansion more profitable. The landscape is where those interactions become visible.

Sayer and colleagues described ten principles for landscape approaches, including continual learning, common concern entry points, multiple scales, multifunctionality, negotiated and transparent change logic, clarification of rights and responsibilities, participatory monitoring and strengthened stakeholder capacity. The principles are not a recipe.

They are reminders that the work is adaptive, political and dependent on relationships. A landscape does not have one objective waiting to be discovered. It contains legitimate interests that may conflict.

That conflict cannot be removed through technical planning. It must be negotiated. A conservation organisation may prioritise habitat connectivity, farmers may prioritise secure land and reliable income, a company may prioritise supply continuity, and a local government may prioritise tax revenue and infrastructure.

A credible approach makes these interests explicit, examines who has decision-making power and agrees how benefits, costs and risks will be distributed. Consensus may not be possible. Fair process and accountable choices remain possible.

The boundary also matters. It should be large enough to include the ecological and economic processes shaping the issue, but small enough for governance to remain workable. A watershed may be appropriate for water management. An administrative jurisdiction may be more practical where enforcement, budgets and land-use authority are decisive.

A sourcing area may be useful for company action but inadequate if commodity flows cross it freely. Boundaries are analytical choices, not natural facts.

Landscape and jurisdictional approaches overlap but are not identical. A jurisdictional approach uses an administrative area and often works through government authority, public policy and jurisdiction-wide performance. A landscape approach may follow ecological, social or production boundaries that cross administrative lines. Neither is inherently stronger.

The test is whether the chosen scale includes the relevant drivers and whether the institutions at that scale can act.

Measurement should reflect both outcomes and governance. Hectares protected, farms trained and trees planted may be useful activity measures. A landscape approach also needs evidence of land-use change, ecosystem condition, livelihood distribution, conflict, institutional capacity and whether agreed rules are followed.

It should track displacement: a reduction in clearing within the focal area is not success if production or deforestation simply moves beyond the boundary.

The approach is therefore less a programme type than a discipline of shared problem-solving. It asks actors to move from parallel projects towards a common understanding of the system, an explicit account of trade-offs, coordinated action and continuous learning. Without those elements, landscape language can become a larger stage on which fragmented interventions continue unchanged.

Practical application

In a coffee landscape, practitioners might begin with a shared diagnosis of forest change, water stress, farm viability, tenure, infrastructure and market incentives. The process should identify who uses the land, who holds rights, who carries risk and which actors can change the rules or resources shaping behaviour.

Companies can contribute traceability, purchasing relationships and finance; governments can contribute land-use authority and services; communities and producers contribute lived knowledge, legitimacy and implementation capacity.

The resulting plan should specify a small number of jointly owned outcomes, the contribution expected from each actor, how disagreements will be handled and how evidence will be reviewed. Governance costs must be budgeted. Convening meetings is not a substitute for decision rights, accountable institutions or long-term finance.

Why it matters

Deforestation, water scarcity, habitat loss, rural poverty and climate risk rarely respect farm or supply-chain boundaries. A landscape approach creates a way to address cumulative drivers and shared resources while making visible the trade-offs that single-issue programmes tend to displace.

Common misconception

A landscape approach is often treated as several projects operating in the same geography. Co-location is not integration. The approach begins when actors share a diagnosis, negotiate objectives and trade-offs, coordinate action, monitor the whole landscape and adapt together.

Connections

Due diligence helps an organisation identify and respond to impacts connected to its value chain. A landscape approach becomes relevant when those impacts arise from shared systems that no organisation can manage alone. It also exposes why the next chapter matters: the people grouped under the label smallholder farmer are not one stakeholder with one set of needs, assets or choices.

A question worth asking

When your organisation calls an initiative a landscape approach, what decisions, resources and accountability are genuinely shared across the landscape that would not exist if each participant continued running its own project?

Selected references

Sayer, J. et al. 2013. Ten Principles for a Landscape Approach to Reconciling Agriculture, Conservation and Other Competing Land Uses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(21): 8349-8356.

Milder, J. C. et al. 2014. Integrated Landscape Initiatives for African Agriculture, Development, and Conservation: A Region-Wide Assessment. World Development 54: 68-80.

Reed, J. et al. 2016. Integrated Landscape Approaches to Managing Social and Environmental Issues in the Tropics: Learning from the Past to Guide the Future. Global Change Biology 22: 2540-2554.

Reed, J. et al. 2020. What Are Integrated Landscape Approaches and How Effectively Have They Been Implemented in the Tropics? Environmental Evidence 9: 2.

Scherr, S. J. , Shames, S. and Friedman, R. 2013. Defining Integrated Landscape Management for Policy Makers. EcoAgriculture Policy Focus No. 10.