Abstract
Landscape approaches to integrated land management have recently gained considerable attention in the scientific literature and international fora. The approach is gaining increasing support at governmental and intergovernmental levels, as well as being embraced by a host of international research and development agencies. In an attempt to determine whether, and how, these approaches compare with previous conservation and development paradigms, we reviewed the implementation of integrated landscape approaches across the tropics. Within the scientific literature we fail to find a single applied example of the landscape approach in the tropics that adequately—that is with reliable, in depth collection and reporting of data—demonstrated the effective balancing of social and environmental trade-offs through multi-scale processes of negotiation for enhanced outcomes. However, we provide an assessment of 150 case studies from unpublished grey literature and 24 peer-reviewed studies that exhibit basic characteristics of landscape approaches. Our findings indicate that landscape approaches show potential as a framework to reconcile conservation and development and improve social capital, enhance community income and employment opportunities as well as reduce land degradation and conserve natural resources. However, comprehensive data on the social and environmental effects of these benefits remain elusive. We identify key contributing factors towards implementation, and progress, of landscape approaches and our findings suggest that multi-level, or polycentric, governance structures relate well with intervention success. We conclude that landscape approaches are a welcome departure from previous unsuccessful attempts at reconciling conservation and development in the tropics but, despite claims to the contrary, remain nascent in both their conceptualization and implementation.
Highlights
Landscape approaches to integrated land management have recently gained considerable attention in the scientific literature and international fora (Sayer et al, 2013; Kusters, 2015; Reed et al, 2016) and represent the latest in a series of attempts to reconcile broad-scale conservation and development objectives (Glamann et al, 2015; Reed et al, 2016)
We critically reviewed both the scientific peer-reviewed and non-published literature to determine 1) where terrestrial landscape approaches have been applied in the tropics, 2) whether conservation and development objectives have been integrated with successful outcomes for both, 3) whether landscape approaches have been effective in securing societal and environmental improvements, 4) which components of landscape approaches have contributed towards these improvements, and 5) what are the governance structures in place
We found evidence of landscape approaches being implemented across the tropics, with 51 of 169 tropical countries represented in the review (Fig. 1)
Summary
Landscape approaches to integrated land management have recently gained considerable attention in the scientific literature and international fora (Sayer et al, 2013; Kusters, 2015; Reed et al, 2016) and represent the latest in a series of attempts to reconcile broad-scale conservation and development objectives (Glamann et al, 2015; Reed et al, 2016). ICDPs were lamented as being too localized in focus—often targeting buffer zones surrounding protected areas—and heavily biased towards achieving conservation targets alone (Sunderland et al, 2012). Such a focus was regarded as sub-optimal for improving rural economic development (McShane et al, 2011), could lead to unforeseen environmental degradation (Garnett et al, 2007; Wells and McShane, 2004), and failed to take into account the inherent trade-offs between social and environmental concerns (Sunderland et al, 2008)
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