Abstract
Land management needs to cope with persistent environmental and societal changes. This requires functional governance systems. The purpose of this research is to develop a good governance framework for the implementation of sustainable land management. Good governance theory is extensive, although its operationalization remains difficult. We derived a set of good governance attributes from the literature: (i) the functionality of the regulatory framework, (ii) the legitimacy and accountability of the actors, (iii) the fairness and transparency of the decision-making processes, and (iv) quality control and adaptiveness. These constitute a framework which, supported by guiding questions, facilitates the evaluation of governance attributes to assess sustainable land management practices. We applied the scheme to a case study in Northeast Brazil regarding sustainable land management where biological pest control is considered to be a biodiversity-related ecosystem service. Since its adoption often falls short of expectations, we scrutinized its governance system. First, experts answered our guiding questions, and second, we involved local stakeholders in the discussion of good governance attributes through the participatory approach of constellation analysis. Trust in agricultural consultants and issues of the practical application of pest control turned out to be crucial. The workshop participants requested a model farm to build more trust and experience. There was considerable demand for policy at the national planning level to formulate and monitor the content of the agricultural advisory program. Our conceptualized framework of good governance questions provides systematization for planning and steering the implementation of sustainable land management practices.
Highlights
Sustainable land and water management aims for a balance between the use and conservation of natural resources
Our focus was on the implementation process of sustainable land management (SLM) practices
We developed an approach to guide the assessment of such a governance process regarding its attributes
Summary
Sustainable land and water management aims for a balance between the use and conservation of natural resources. Governance structures increasingly include societal actors besides governmental organizations at multiple levels. We are here primarily interested in the environmental governance process. Our focus on process attributes is based on the assumption that the process conditions must first improve before the associated thematic evaluation can take place in a comprehensive manner [1]. We focus on the attributes that promote the making of fair and just decisions for water and land management. These cannot be scrutinized completely separately from other governance attributes, such as the efficient and sustainable use of resources
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