Our program-level ToC is reassessed annually to accurately reflect new information (e.g. new bilateral projects) and new understanding (e.g. of how WLE delivers outcomes and impacts). 2020 adjustments applied across WLE’s flagships (FPs) include:
● A focus on three ‘foundational’ impact pathways: (1) transdisciplinary innovation; (2) policy
influence; (3) brokering practices and technologies and enhancing implementation capacity.
● Encouraging WLE interventions to address both equity and sustainability.

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.

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.

Implementing Ecosystem and Ecosystem Services (EES) projects in Fragile and Conflict-affected Settings (FCS) poses both operational challenges and the risk of inadvertently aggravating socio-political dynamics. The intertwined relationship between human, ecological, and economic systems makes these projects sensitive to conflict dynamics related to land access, environmental degradation, and livelihoods. Changes in ecosystems can be exploited by groups like political elites or armed entities, as observed in numerous case studies.

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.

Kiteto District Livestock Officer Birikaa Olesikilal talks about the benefits of joint village land use planning and participatory rangeland management, Tanzania. Filmed by Marco Buemi http://www.marcobuemi.com Produced by Fiona Flintan, Marco Buemi and Patrick Augenstein 2021

Landscape Approaches have been proposed as a transferable model of multi-stakeholder governance, yet assume conditions of ideal speech, trust, and transparency that seem untransferable to authoritarian regimes. This paper argues that building Landscape Approaches under authoritarian conditions cannot be based on a governance deficit model of awaiting idealized political conditions, but instead needs to pay attention to how local social and political structures influence what is deliberated, and by whom.

Indonesia has experienced one of the world's fastest plantation expansions. Plantation growth is indeed an economic solution to meet the market's needs, but the accompanying environmental damage and social conflict are at odds with sustainability goals. Various actors with interests in land compete with the power they have. The most powerful actors have controlled land use based on their decisions. Accordingly, this paper presents empirical evidence to understand the important role of powerful actors in land-use contestation in oil palm and industrial plantation forests.

Agri-food systems face multiple challenges. They must deal with prevailing structural weaknesses, partly deepened by the disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, civil conflicts, and climate change. Addressing structural weaknesses – such as inequitable access to healthy and nutritious food for all, loss of livelihoods and incomes, and increasing environmental shocks – requires not only technological, but also institutional innovations, as well as economic and policy responses.

This occasional paper presents a new approach to examining how multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) on land use and land-use change address equity. Based on a review of cases in the scholarly literature, we engage with MSFs from two key characteristics: the degree to which an MSF includes local peoples as part of a forest-landscape solution (its intensity), and the degree to which an MSF and/or its goals or objectives are embedded or entangled in wider societal or governmental programs and processes (its embeddedness).

In the midst of global change uncertainties, Indonesian spatial planning authorities are developing 20-year strategies. However, the lack of collaborative engagement of stakeholders and unclear methodology around using futures studies in addressing land management undermine such plans and affect environmental governance. A crucial question is how to link a future-oriented process with governance transformation processes, particularly related to land-use planning and management.