In 2016, Indigenous communities began to gain access to land rights in Indonesia’s vast state forests. The Kajang community of Sulawesi was the first to achieve such legal land status. Kajang also gained attention for its use of PAR to gain consensus across stakeholder groups in securing recognition. The jointly produced local regulation became symbolic for its ability to convene activists and local government, with Kajang Indigenous leaders at the center.

Kiteto District Livestock Officer Birikaa Olesikilal talks about the benefits of joint village land use planning and participatory rangeland management, Tanzania. Filmed by Marco Buemi http://www.marcobuemi.com Produced by Fiona Flintan, Marco Buemi and Patrick Augenstein 2021

Smallholder farmers constitute the largest group of economic actors in Malawi and there is increasing recognition that the small scale at which they operate does not offer for most a pathway out of poverty, let alone to prosperity.

Indigenous Peoples’ lands (IPL) cover at least 38 million km2 (28.1%) of the global terrestrial surface. These lands can be important for biodiversity conservation. Around 20.7% of IPL intersect areas protected by government (PAs). Many sites of importance for biodiversity within IPL could make a substantial but hitherto unquantified contribution to Global site-based conservation targets. Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) represent the largest global network of systematically identified sites of high importance for biodiversity.

Our program-level ToC is reassessed annually to accurately reflect new information (e.g. new bilateral projects) and new understanding (e.g. of how WLE delivers outcomes and impacts). 2020 adjustments applied across WLE’s flagships (FPs) include:
● A focus on three ‘foundational’ impact pathways: (1) transdisciplinary innovation; (2) policy
influence; (3) brokering practices and technologies and enhancing implementation capacity.
● Encouraging WLE interventions to address both equity and sustainability.

Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) are increasingly applied in environmental governance as institutions to collectively negotiate challenges, opportunities, and policy options in contested landscapes. However, their contributions and effectiveness depend on how stakeholders perceive and frame the role of MSPs in addressing social and environmental challenges. Despite this dependence, stakeholder perceptions of MSPs are currently under-researched.

This occasional paper presents a new approach to examining how multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) on land use and land-use change address equity. Based on a review of cases in the scholarly literature, we engage with MSFs from two key characteristics: the degree to which an MSF includes local peoples as part of a forest-landscape solution (its intensity), and the degree to which an MSF and/or its goals or objectives are embedded or entangled in wider societal or governmental programs and processes (its embeddedness).

In the midst of global change uncertainties, Indonesian spatial planning authorities are developing 20-year strategies. However, the lack of collaborative engagement of stakeholders and unclear methodology around using futures studies in addressing land management undermine such plans and affect environmental governance. A crucial question is how to link a future-oriented process with governance transformation processes, particularly related to land-use planning and management.

IFPRI research team published a book "Climate-Smart Agriculture in South Asia" that contains various methodology for priority setting, land use decision, and policy review. In addition, IFPRI in collaboration with CCAFS has developed an analytical toolkit for climate-smart investment plans at the sub-national level in India. The World Bank Group has shown interest in the concept delineated in the above-mentioned pieces of evidence and research collaboration has been established that will help World Banks' investment decision.

Landscape Approaches have been proposed as a transferable model of multi-stakeholder governance, yet assume conditions of ideal speech, trust, and transparency that seem untransferable to authoritarian regimes. This paper argues that building Landscape Approaches under authoritarian conditions cannot be based on a governance deficit model of awaiting idealized political conditions, but instead needs to pay attention to how local social and political structures influence what is deliberated, and by whom.

Indonesia has experienced one of the world's fastest plantation expansions. Plantation growth is indeed an economic solution to meet the market's needs, but the accompanying environmental damage and social conflict are at odds with sustainability goals. Various actors with interests in land compete with the power they have. The most powerful actors have controlled land use based on their decisions. Accordingly, this paper presents empirical evidence to understand the important role of powerful actors in land-use contestation in oil palm and industrial plantation forests.