Abstract
Sustainable management of resources is crucial for balancing competing livelihood, economic, and environmental goals. Since forests and other systems do not exist in isolation, comprehensive jurisdictional approaches to forest, and land-use governance can help promote sustainability. The ability of jurisdictions to provide evidence of progress toward sustainability is essential for attracting public and private sector investments and maintaining local stakeholder involvement. The Sustainable Landscapes Rating Tool (SLRT) provides a way to assess enabling conditions for jurisdictional sustainability through an evidence-based rating system. We applied this rating tool in 19 states and provinces across six countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Cote d'Ivoire, Mexico, Peru) that are members of the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF TF). Each SLRT assessment was completed using publicly available information, interviews with stakeholders in the jurisdiction, and a multi-stakeholder workshop to validate the indicator ratings. This paper explores the effects of stakeholder involvement in the validation process, along with stakeholder perceptions of the tool's usefulness. Our analysis shows that the validation workshops often led to modifications of the indicator ratings, even for indicators originally assessed using publicly available data, highlighting the gap between existence of a policy and its implementation. Also, a more diverse composition of stakeholders at the workshops led to more changes in indicator ratings, which indicates the importance of including different perspectives in compiling and validating the assessments. Overall, most participants agreed that the tool is useful for self-assessment of the jurisdiction and to address coordination gaps. Further, the validation workshops provided a space for discussions across government agencies, civil society organizations (CSOs), producer organizations, indigenous peoples and local community representatives, and researchers about improving policy and governance conditions. Our findings from the analysis of a participatory approach to collecting and validating data can be used to inform future research on environmental governance and sustainability.
Highlights
Balancing competing livelihood, economic, and environmental goals requires an integrated approach to sustainable management of resources at the landscape level
This study highlights the importance and contributions of validating data on governance conditions that enable sustainable landscapes through multi-stakeholder workshops. Do these workshops provide an avenue for obtaining additional clarity on policies and programs to better capture the reality of enabling conditions, they allow for discussions between stakeholders within a jurisdiction
Successfully implementing the Sustainable Landscapes Rating Tool (SLRT) or a similar tool in jurisdictions must take into consideration political cycles and administration/personnel changes, as these will likely affect the availability of information and the total time needed to complete the tool
Summary
Economic, and environmental goals requires an integrated approach to sustainable management of resources at the landscape level. Since forests and other ecosystems do not exist in isolation, comprehensive landscape, and jurisdictional approaches to forest and land-use governance are considered pathways to promote sustainability. These approaches offer an alternative to conservation and development projects and farm-by-farm or supply chain certification schemes. The SLRT was designed to be flexible (via addition or removal of indicators) and applied at the subnational jurisdictional level with multiple objectives and users in mind (SLRT, 2017a) Its developers envisioned it as an “objective, evidence-based” tool that governments, producers, and other landscape actors could apply and use to communicate about the status of key governance conditions to attract investment and other support, to benchmark progress, and to build support and alignment among diverse stakeholders and facilitate planning to address gaps. The SLRT aims to foster partnerships and enhance coordination among landscape actors and lead to improvements in polices, governance, and other enabling conditions for jurisdictional sustainability
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