The challenges of multi-actor collaborations in climate-smart agriculture under the landscape approach

With a growing world population to around 9 billion people in 2050 and the rise of global warming, there are growing concerns about food security for a large part of the world population. This is compounded by other environmental disasters such as deforestation, desertification, water scarcity, pollution and loss of bio -diversity. Human activity is putting more and more pressure on the natural environment. Hence, there is widespread consensus that a more sustainable balance must be struck between human needs and the preservation of natural resources such as land, water and forests (World Resources Institute, 2019). Generally, the solution to such large and complex issues, has been to call for multi -actor collaboration at international, national and local levels. In 2015, the UN emphasized PPPs as the key vehicle to reach the sustainable development goals. Large programs such as REDD+ concerning deforestation, were set up. Multilateral organizations such as the FAO and World Bank promoted the concept of Climate -Smart Agriculture (CSA) which aims to increase agricultural productivity, enhance resilience and reduce emissions (World Bank, 2020). Management of the these “commons” is achieved through a landscape approach, which aims at multi - actor collaboration. It looks beyond agriculture, integrating it with forestry and other land uses to forge a comprehensive agenda for sustainable development to eradicate poverty, strengthen food and nutrition security (FAO, 2013). However, these big concepts also face a number of challenges. Empirical evidence about the efficiency of the landscape approach is still scarce and often not as unambiguous as underlined in theory due to many obstacles and measurement challenges (The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, 2013). One particular challenge is the institutional side of the landscape approach, in terms of its legal, administrative or even political aspects. This paper dives deeper into this topic by focusing on the institutional and governance aspects of the landscape approach in CSA and compares these with another framework for multi -actor collaboration, namely High Performance Partnerships (HPP), to assess which approach might be more successful to achieve the goals of CSA