Abstract
Background: There is an increasing acceptance that sectorial approaches to land management are no longer sufficient to meet global challenges such as poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and food production. The pressing challenge of integrated landscape management is to link agricultural practices, institutions and policies with other landscape-scale activities. “Integrated Landscape Approaches” provide a basic framework for balancing competing demands and integrating policies for multiple land uses within a given area. However, attempts to formalize and characterize what landscape approaches actually represent have resulted in a plethora of interlinked terminology and re-invention of ideas and practices under multiple guises. This has led to delayed uptake amongst policy makers and resistance to implementation on the ground. This protocol will describe the methodology to be employed for a systematic map that will chart the development of the landscape approach theory, consolidate and synthesize existing definitions, and identify where and how these approaches have been implemented in the humid and dry tropics. Methods/Design: A scoping exercise gave rise to a selection of search terms appropriate to the research question which will then be applied to a suite of specialist, online and institutional databases. The protocol will follow a population-intervention-comparator-outcome (P.I.C.O) framework which provides the basic rationale for evidence-based systematic literature searches. The P.I.C.O serves as the inclusion criteria and together with a pre-determined exclusion criteria will be used to screen retrieved literature for relevance at title, abstract and full text levels. All studies investigating either landscape approach theory or implementation within the humid and dry tropics will be included. The resulting studies will be coded and used to satisfy two key outcomes. First, literature on the theory of landscape-scale approaches will be compared and contrasted to identify where overlap and disjuncture exists. Second, studies of landscape approach implementation will be assessed for effectiveness, geographically mapped, made available in searchable databases and supplemented with a full report.
Highlights
There is an increasing acceptance that sectorial approaches to land management are no longer sufficient to meet global challenges such as poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and food production
Conventional post-war sectorial approaches to food production, conservation and development initiatives alone are no longer seen as viable, sustainable strategies to address these often inter-connected issues [2,3,4]
A Landscape Approach is broadly defined as a framework to integrate policy and practice for multiple land uses, within a given area, to ensure equitable and sustainable use of land while strengthening measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change [5,6,7,8]
Summary
Poverty alleviation, climate change, and biodiversity loss are global challenges that have been at the forefront of international agendas during the last decade [1]. This review can complement local knowledge and other reviews which engage directly with practitioners on the ground [19,20] It is anticipated this process will help inform the development of a clear strategy on landscape-scale management, contribute to the integration of conservation, agriculture and other land uses into future land use policies and identify how landscape approaches can be best implemented to support the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals. Stakeholder consultation, the author group’s prior knowledge, and screening of the literature will identify key conceptual frameworks for landscape approaches produced in recent decades These will be formatted in a web diagram in order to highlight overlaps and disjuncture, with reference to terminology applied. Theoretical papers will, be included as they will help to document how landscape approach theory has developed
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