The Definition of a 'Landscape' in Forest Restoration

A landscape in forest restoration functions as a complex socio-ecological system that integrates natural ecosystems, agricultural production and human settlements. Effective landscape governance requires robust rights-based approaches to balance biodiversity conservation with the livelihood needs of local communities.

What defines a landscape in the context of forest restoration?

Evolving forest definitions

• Structural classifications: Historical concepts focused heavily on timber yield and minimum canopy cover requirements. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) relies on a structural definition requiring a 10 percent minimum tree crown cover and an area larger than 0.5 hectares. This definition classifies temporarily unstocked areas and monoculture plantations as forests. Consequently, countries often report zero net deforestation even while commercial operators clear-cut vast tracts of primary rainforest.
• Ecological classifications: Conservation ecologists apply a broader lens that prioritises biological diversity and ecological integrity. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) defines a forest as a dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities interacting as a functional unit. This definition demands a focus on species richness and resilient food webs rather than mere canopy density.
• Socio-ecological integration: Modern landscape approaches apply systems thinking to view forests as complex adaptive systems intimately linked with human societies. This perspective treats the forest not as an isolated entity but as an interactive component within a broader matrix of agricultural lands, human settlements and riparian zones. Managing this matrix requires balancing multiple land uses rather than erecting strict boundaries between humans and nature.

The shift to forest and landscape restoration

• Reconceptualising recovery: Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) emerged as a planned process aiming to regain ecological functionality and enhance human well-being across deforested or degraded landscapes. The framework moves beyond site-specific ecological restoration to address multiple land uses simultaneously. Planners must consider the entire geographical area to orchestrate interventions that deliver both environmental and economic dividends.
• Differentiating restoration pathways: Restoration planners must differentiate between spontaneous natural regeneration, commercial tree plantations and agroforestry systems. Each pathway delivers different outcomes for carbon storage, indigenous trees and native biodiversity, and local economiesAssessing individual forest patches requires an understanding of their historical context and their dynamic trajectories over time.
• Balancing competing needs: As of 2026, the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration requires planners to balance the competing needs of diverse stakeholder groups across large geographical areas. This approach necessitates profound compromises between conservationists advocating for wilderness protection and farmers requiring arable land for sustenance.

How do different disciplines interpret forest landscape restoration?

Five distinct conceptual frameworks

• Biodiversity and ecological integrity: The conservation community views restoration primarily through the lens of safeguarding biodiversity and regaining ecological integrity. Conservation biologists focus on habitat reconstruction, expanding protected areas and creating biological corridors to support endangered species.
• Land degradation and food security: Rural development specialists interpret restoration as a tool to reverse land degradation and enhance food security. Agronomists and extension officers promote climate-smart agriculture and agroforestry to support smallholder farmers.
• Natural capital and ecosystem services: Economists construct restoration as an investment in natural capital. This framework quantifies ecosystem services and creates market mechanisms to fund large-scale tree planting and carbon sequestration projects.
• Sustained timber production: Foresters approach restoration with the primary goal of sustaining timber production. They utilise silvicultural techniques to rehabilitate degraded lands and improve the structural quality of commercially managed forests.
• Climate mitigation and adaptation: Climate scientists position restoration as a vital mechanism for climate change mitigation and adaptation. They measure success through carbon storage metrics and the increased resilience of ecosystems to extreme weather events.

Reconciling diverse management objectives

• Navigating ideological friction: These differing interpretations create friction when stakeholders define project goals and measure success. A forester planting fast-growing exotic species for timber clashes directly with a conservationist aiming to restore native habitats. Resolving these conflicts requires transparent dialogue and formalised dispute resolution procedures.
• Deploying governance standards: The Natural Resource Governance Framework (NRGF) helps project architects navigate these competing priorities. The framework provides standards for inclusive decision-making and equitable resource distribution across complex landscapes. Implementing these standards ensures that powerful industrial interests do not marginalise vulnerable communities.

Implementing operational models: Successful implementation requires transparent negotiation platforms where all actors can articulate their objectives. For a practical look at how these principles are applied at ground level, FTFA's resources on Community-based natural resource management provide detailed operational guidance. The table below illustrates the diverse organisations driving these initiatives (Mansourian, 2018).

Why is landscape governance critical to restoration success?

Scaling up to meet global targets

• Executing massive mandates: Global policy makers launched the Bonn Challenge to restore 150 million hectares of degraded land by 2020. The New York Declaration on Forests subsequently expanded this target to 350 million hectares by 2030. Achieving these massive mandates requires coordinated action across entire regions rather than isolated interventions in fragmented reserves.
• Managing institutional complexity: Landscape governance provides the institutional arrangements, policy instruments and decision-making processes necessary to manage these vast spatial scales. Project implementers face severe challenges when ecological boundaries do not align with administrative borders. Effective governance bridges these institutional silos to create coherent spatial planning mechanisms across entire catchments.
• Fulfilling international obligations: Governments utilise landscape restoration to meet their commitments under the Aichi Targets and the Paris Agreement. By integrating agricultural planning with forest conservation, state agencies can streamline their environmental objectives and deploy financial resources more efficiently.

Negotiating trade-offs and building resilience

• Adapting to ecological feedback: Landscape approaches operate on the principle of continual learning and adaptive management. Planners must constantly adjust their strategies based on environmental feedback and changing societal needs. Flexible institutional frameworks allow project managers to abandon failing tactics and rapidly scale successful innovations.
• Facilitating transparent compromises: Multi-stakeholder platforms enable representatives from government, private enterprise and civil society to negotiate trade-offs explicitly. These forums expose conflicting interests and facilitate compromises that balance economic growth with environmental protection. Without these platforms, elite actors frequently co-opt resources and exclude local populations from decision-making.
• Engineering systemic durability: Resilient landscapes maintain their functionality despite external shocks like climate change or market volatility. Diverse land uses and robust governance structures prevent the systemic failures common in heavily simplified monoculture environments. Fostering biodiversity directly translates into greater economic stability for rural communities.

How do rights-based approaches integrate with landscape governance?

Securing tenure and empowering local institutions

• Enforcing procedural safeguards: Rights-based approaches (RBAs) ensure that conservation programmes respect, protect and promote the substantive and procedural rights of indigenous peoples and local communities. Planners must secure free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) before initiating any interventions that alter local land use. Robust stakeholder engagement prevents government agencies from overriding customary land rights arbitrarily.
• Reforming ownership paradigms: In sub-Saharan Africa, ambiguous land tenure laws frequently undermine restoration efforts. When the state retains ownership of all naturally occurring trees, farmers perceive valuable timber species as liabilities rather than assets. Granting formal tree tenure to smallholder farmers incentivises aggressive afforestation and sustainable harvesting practices.
• Deploying community mechanisms: The Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) model in Ghana addresses these tenure challenges by transferring management authority directly to local communities. The mechanism empowers a locally elected executive committee to regulate natural resource use within a defined geographical boundary. This decentralised approach dramatically reduces illegal logging and unregulated bush-meat hunting.
• Validating customary boundaries: Participatory mapping initiatives allow communities to demarcate customary land boundaries accurately. These maps serve as vital legal instruments that protect local resources from arbitrary reallocation to commercial agricultural or mining concessions. Formal integration of these maps into municipal planning documents secures long-term indigenous land claims.

Transitioning from beneficiaries to rights holders

• Demanding structural accountability: Integrating an RBA requires a fundamental paradigm shift in how conservation organisations interact with local populations. Planners must stop viewing communities as passive recipients of aid and start treating them as active rights holders capable of holding duty bearers to account. This transition demands deep structural changes within project design and implementation.
• Contrasting methodological models: Traditional conservation practices often reinforce colonial power dynamics by excluding local voices from strategic planning. Rights-based frameworks systematically dismantle these hierarchies by transferring technical capacity and legal literacy directly to community leaders. The table below outlines the critical differences between these two distinct approaches (Walters et al., 2019).

What mechanisms ensure accountability and transparency in restoration?

Monitoring impacts and sharing benefits

• Democratising information access: Landscape governance relies heavily on transparent information sharing to prevent elite capture of natural resources. Citizens require timely access to technical reports, budget allocations and spatial plans to participate meaningfully in decision-making processes. Translating complex ecological data into local dialects ensures that marginalised groups remain informed and engaged.
• Structuring financial dividends: The Trees for Global Benefits (TGB) Programme links smallholder farmers to voluntary carbon markets through verifiable agroforestry models. Programme managers deliberately target low-income households to ensure that carbon revenues directly support local livelihood generation. Consolidating small landholdings into formal collectives allows marginalised farmers to meet the minimum acreage requirements for international carbon certification.
• Incentivising environmental stewardship: The Environmental Conservation Trust of Uganda (ECOTRUST) facilitates community-led environmental management plans that respond to local vulnerabilities. The organisation provides micro-credit funds to communities that successfully implement soil conservation and micro-catchment regeneration strategies. These financial incentives rapidly accelerate the adoption of sustainable farming techniques.
• Deploying operational safeguards: Project architects must implement rigorous social safeguards to prevent unintended harm to vulnerable populations. An Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) screens all proposed interventions for potential human rights violations and mandates strict mitigation protocols.

Strengthening local governance structures

• Enforcing democratic oversight: Institutions must remain downwardly accountable to their constituents rather than upwardly accountable to external donors. Regular democratic elections and public financial disclosures help communities remove underperforming or corrupt leaders from executive committees. Independent audits provide vital regulatory feedback that prevents the systemic mismanagement of communal assets.
• Influencing national policy: The Mount Elgon Stakeholders Forum provides a vital platform for forest-dependent communities to influence national climate change policies directly. The forum successfully lobbied parliamentary representatives to integrate rights-based indicators into national development strategies. Exposing national policy makers to grassroots ecological realities dramatically accelerates legislative reform.
• Integrating municipal frameworks: Local government authorities play a crucial role in monitoring project outcomes and enforcing community bylaws. Integrating rights-based indicators into municipal planning frameworks ensures that public officials possess the mandate and resources to sustain restoration initiatives long after external funding concludes. In Cameroon, civil society networks actively monitor REDD+ readiness activities to guarantee broad public participation in forest management initiatives.

How does gender equality shape landscape governance outcomes?

Moving beyond political commitments to legal obligations

• Aligning global frameworks: International policy frameworks frequently promote gender mainstreaming as a strategy to achieve social equity. The United Nations includes gender equality as a dedicated Sustainable Development Goal to address historical marginalisation in the agricultural and forestry sectors. Effective implementation requires embedding these goals directly into operational budgets and resource allocation models.
• Overcoming legal contradictions: Translating soft political commitments into enforceable legal obligations remains a significant challenge for project implementers. While many national constitutions theoretically guarantee equal rights, pluralistic legal systems often allow customary laws to override statutory protections regarding property inheritance. Project managers must navigate these complex legal environments carefully to secure tangible rights for female farmers.
• Leveraging international treaties: Conservation practitioners possess a unique opportunity to leverage international treaties to drive local reform. By anchoring project objectives in existing human rights law, architects create sustainable pathways for female empowerment. Collaborative workshops between national policy makers and local women's organisations expose structural inequalities and generate practical roadmaps for legislative reform.

Securing access, use and procedural rights

• Formalising resource ownership: Women frequently lack secure tenure over the land they cultivate and the natural resources they depend upon for household survival. Without formal title deeds, female farmers struggle to access agricultural credit, technical training and emerging carbon markets. Securing independent land rights fundamentally transforms a woman's economic trajectory and elevates her status within the community.
• Recognising disparate interactions: Project planners must recognise that men and women interact with forest landscapes in fundamentally different ways. While men typically extract timber for commercial sale, women generally harvest non-timber forest products, medicinal plants and firewood for domestic consumption. Unregulated enclosure of forest land disproportionately threatens the nutritional security of female-headed households.

Dismantling patriarchal barriers: True procedural equity requires dismantling the patriarchal structures that actively prevent women from occupying leadership roles in landscape management committees. Providing logistical support such as child care and transport enables female representatives to participate fully and effectively in complex policy negotiations.

To see how these inclusive governance structures empower marginalised farmers, explore FTFA's resources on Enterprise development.