Managing for resilience: a landscape framework for food and livelihood security and ecosystem services

Abstract

To address the twin pressures of land degradation and climate change in communities of agriculturalists, agro-pastoralists and pastoralists who are vulnerable to acute and chronic food and livelihood insecurity, we review emerging resilience approaches to agricultural development and present a resilience framework for agriculture and resource management at multiple scales and social-ecological interfaces. The paper draws on academic literature, field observation, insight from development researchers and practitioners, and agency reports to build a framework for guiding investment in initiatives that stand to sustainably improve the livelihoods of rural populations whose livelihood security is at risk from a combination of poverty and drought, deforestation, over-grazing, forced migration or other shocks. We suggest how working at landscape scale to link interventions in agroecological, livelihood, ecological and institutional dimensions of resilience, and integrating the four dimensions through stakeholder-engaged, adaptive collaborative management enables synergies to be captured and trade-offs reduced. We use the insights from development practitioners, political ecologists, and rural sociologists to highlight the need to historically, politically, and culturally situate this framework, and to emphasize the importance of participatory methods in successful resilient landscape management projects.