Collaborative stewardship in multifunctional landscapes: Toward relational, pluralistic approaches

Landscape stewardship offers a means to put social-ecological approaches to stewardship into practice. The growing interest in landscape stewardship has led to a focus on multistakeholder collaboration. Although there is a significant body of literature on collaborative management and governance of natural resources, the particular challenges posed by multifunctional landscapes, in which there are often contested interests, require closer attention. We present a case study from South Africa to investigate how collaborative stewardship can be fostered in contested multifunctional landscapes. We conducted this research through an engaged transdisciplinary research partnership in which we integrated social-ecological practitioner and academic knowledge to gain an in-depth understanding of the challenges of fostering collaboration. We identified five overarching factors that influence collaboration: contextual, institutional, social-relational, individual, and political-historical. Collaborative stewardship approaches focused on the development of formal governance institutions appear to be most successful if enabling individual and social-relational conditions are in place. Our case study, characterized by high social diversity, inequity, and contestation, suggests that consensus-driven approaches to collaboration are unlikely to result in equitable and sustainable landscape stewardship in such contexts. We therefore suggest an approach that focuses on enhancing individual and social-relational enablers. Moreover, we propose a bottom-up patchwork approach to collaborative stewardship premised on the notion of pluralism. This would focus on building new interpersonal relationships and collaborative capacity through small collective actions. Taking a relational, pluralistic approach to fostering collaborative stewardship is particularly important in contested, socially heterogeneous landscapes. Drawing on our study and the literature, we propose guiding principles for implementing relational, pluralistic approaches to collaborative stewardship and suggest future research directions for supporting such approaches

Landscape Agroecology: managing interactions between agriculture, nature and socio-economy

State of the art GIS and database technologies for landscape scale analysis and the modelling of land use and environmental impacts are presented. These methods have been developed at University of Aarhus in multidisciplinary collaboration with other research institutions throughout Europe; for example during the EU research projects www.mea-scope.org and www.sensor-ip.eu. In the years to come, these landscape scale research methods are further developed and integrated with similar frameworks in other EU countries, and used for scenario studies (see for example the landscape components of http://www.nitroeurope.eu/, http://www.darcof.dk/research/darcofiii/refugia.html or http://www.darcof.dk/research/darcofiii/bioconcens.html). Scenario studies, visualised in geographical information systems, are useful to evaluate possible future landscape developments, and to identify potentials and limitations in combining multiple landscape functions. Here we focus on scenario systems that focus on exploring interactions between landscape functions – e.g. the interactions between farm management, economy, nutrient losses, fauna population dynamics, plant community development etc. Among others, scenarios for drinking water protection via increased set-aside grassland or afforestation are presented. It shows that benefits from subsidies targeted to areas with special interests in protection of drinking waters from nitrogen pollution differ from non-targeted subsidies. Experience has shown that working with scenarios and involving potential users at an early stage in development are important ways of focussing the work effort and ensuring that relevant tools are developed. Developments in data collection and collation at the EU level will allow similar systems to be developed elsewhere

Mapping and modelling multifunctional landscapes

De maatschappij profiteert van een grote verscheidenheid van diensten die door het landschap geleverd worden. Deze zogenaamde ‘landschapsdiensten’ omvatten onder andere de productie van voedsel en hout, de levering van drinkwater, klimaatregulatie, landschapsbeleving en recreatiemogelijkheden. Landschapsdiensten zijn ongelijk verdeeld over het landschap, sommige plekken leveren meer of andere diensten dan andere plekken. Om het landschap zo goed mogelijk te gebruiken is het voor beleidsmakers belangrijk te weten waar en hoeveel landschapsdiensten geleverd worden. Het probleem is dat er op dit moment geen kaarten zijn die deze informatie voor volledige regio’s laten zien. Daarbij is ook de kennis beperkt over in hoeverre landschapsdiensten veranderen als hun omgeving verandert. Met name op multifunctionele locaties waar mensen het landschap veranderen om de levering van één specifieke landschapsdienst te versterken, spelen keuzes in landschapsmanagement een belangrijke rol, aangezien veranderingen in het landschap elke aanwezige landschapsdienst op een andere wijze zal beïnvloeden. Om deze twee problemen aan te pakken richt dit proefschrift zich op het ontwikkelen van methoden om de huidige en toekomstige staat van een aantal landschapsdiensten van Gelderse Vallei regio te kunnen kwantificeren en karteren. In proefschrift focussen we ons voornamelijk op methoden die ruimtelijke patronen en processen die deze ontwikkelingen in de tijd en ruimte kunnen beschrijven. De kaarten en het verbeterde begrip van landschapsdynamieken, die resulteren uit dit proefschrift, kunnen helpen om in de toekomst het ruimtelijk beleid voor multifunctionele gebieden beter te ontwerpen en te evalueren

Designing multifunctional landscapes for forest conservation

A multifunctional landscape approach to forest protection has been advocated for tropical countries. Designing such landscapes necessitates that the role of different land uses in protecting forest be evaluated, along with the spatial interactions between land uses. However, such evaluations have been hindered by a lack of suitable analysis methodologies and data with fine spatial resolution over long time periods. We demonstrate the utility of a matching method with multiple categories to evaluate the role of alternative land uses in protecting forest. We also assessed the impact of land use change trajectories on the rate of deforestation. We employed data from Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) at three different time periods during 2000–2012 to illustrate our approach. Four single land uses (protected areas (PA), natural forest logging concessions (LC), timber plantation concessions (TC) and oil-palm plantation concessions (OC)) and two mixed land uses (mixed concessions and the overlap between concessions and PA) were assessed. The rate of deforestation was found to be lowest for PA, followed by LC. Deforestation rates for all land uses tended to be highest for locations that share the characteristics of areas in which TC or OC are located (e.g. degraded areas), suggesting that these areas are inherently more susceptible to deforestation due to foregone opportunities. Our approach provides important insights into how multifunctional landscapes can be designed to enhance the protection of biodiversity