A. Larson

• PhD
• Principal Scientist and Theme Lead at Center for International Forestry Research- World Agroforestry

This chapter presents ways of enhancing justice in international landscape restoration initiatives. We depart from the three-dimensional environmental justice framework to draw from decolonial and indigenous justice perspectives, placing particular attention to human-nature binaries, epistemic justice, relational ontology, self-determination, and s...

Mensajes clave Alcanzar los objetivos climáticos mundiales requiere asociaciones mutuamente beneficiosas para los Estados, los Pueblos Indígen as y las comunidades locales. Los incentivos para la conservación plantean desafíos de implementación y pueden dar lugar a posibles conflictos, injusticias, desigualdades de género y la erosión de cosmovis...

This study delves into perceptions of land and forest tenure (in)security among Indigenous and mestizo populations in the Peruvian Amazon. Despite all having collective lands, the selected communities vary in their formalisation processes. This research seeks to enhance comprehension of tenure security perceptions in the Peruvian Amazon by investig...

Conservation incentives have become a popular strategy for deforestation prevention worldwide. In tropical forests, engaging Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IP&LCs) as partners increases the likelihood of both conservation and equity (IPBES 2019). However, programmes that target forests on communal and Indigenous land risk generating conf...

This preliminary assessment of rights-based approaches (RBAs) seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussions of RBAs for Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs). RBAs purposefully position the recognition of, respect for, and access to individual and collective rights as central to an initiative’s planning, design, implementation, pr...

The chapter has now been published. You find it OA here: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197683958.003.0004 Ramcilovic-Suominen, and others, 2024. 'Decolonial environmental justice in landscape restoration', in Pia Katila, and others (eds), Restoring Forests and Trees for Sustainable Development: Policies, Practices, Impacts, and Ways Forward (New York...

Over the past two decades, growing recognition of forest-based Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) sparked forest tenure reforms to formalize IP and LC rights to forests and forest lands through a variety of mechanisms. Nevertheless, tenure security, an intended objective of such reforms, has received less attention, despite bein...

Virtually all major efforts to address global problems regarding land and resource use call for a multi-stakeholder process. At the same time, there is growing interest in, and commitment to, inclusion of previously marginalized groups – e.g., Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs), smallholders, and women in these groups – in decisions r...

As forest tenure reform is mainstreamed around the world, outcomes are increasingly determined by the institutions that are responsible for administering its operationalisation and translating policy into implementation. This global study examines state institutional contexts of tenure reform in Kenya, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, and Peru. Interviews...

Forest and water are linked resources that are important to community livelihoods in East Africa. Sectoral reforms in Kenya have decentralized forest and water management functions to local communities through forest and water Acts. It has been argued that problems are more likely to be understood as interconnected, and thus managed more holistical...

Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) are the subject of increasing attention and investment in the domain of collaborative natural resource governance, yet evidence-based guidance is slim on policy and investment priorities to leverage the MSP approach. We provide a comparative analysis of eight landscape-level MSPs spanning seven countries (Peru, Bra...

Forests in low and middle-income countries are at the centre of climate change mitigation efforts. But these forests are also areas of high levels of insecurity and are found in fragile states with weak governance, especially over forestlands. Nations affected by conflict hold 40 per cent of the world’s tropical forests (Donovan et al. 2007). No fe...

We are living in a time of crisis on planet Earth. Urgent calls for transformational change are getting louder. Technical solutions have an important role to play in addressing pressing global challenges, but alone they are not enough. After all, who decides what kind of transformation is needed, of what, and for whom? What principles guide those d...

This paper examines the Green Municipalities Program (Programa Municípios Verdes – PMV) – a major multi-stakeholder forum designed to combat deforestation – in Pará state in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. We qualitatively analyzed in-depth interviews with 39 people with different perspectives: respondents with deep knowledge of the context but no di...

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) have received much attention from policymakers and development and conservation practitioners as a transformative solution for more equitable coordination and decision-making over environmental challenges. Studies on "invited spaces" have previously shown the importance of balancing power relations and attending to c...

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are coordination spaces that enable discussions, negotiations, and joint planning between different kinds of actors. Proponents of MSFs claim that bringing different actors to the same table may help solve complex problems. Nevertheless, an MSF's process and outcomes are affected by its leadership and whether partici...

The use of multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) in territorial planning has gained global popularity. These MSFs aim to bring diverse actors together to collaboratively and equitably develop a plan that assigns optimal land uses to a territory. However, as promoting particular land uses and benefits for some actors often comes at a cost to others, terri...

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) have become a popular mechanism in global development and conservation circles, given the urgency to find transformative approaches to address climate change and unsustainable development. In this current context, it is important to take stock of MSFs, an example of a participatory mechanism that is emerging as a new...

As interest grows in supporting multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) to address land-use and climate change, it is important to understand how these processes operate from the perspectives of their participants. The academic literature on their equity largely presents a dichotomy: participatory processes either allow for horizontal decision-making with...

Following global trends, Multi-Stakeholder Forums (MSFs) have received attention as mechanisms for addressing deforestation and forest degradation in Ethiopia. However, little is understood on their influence on governance of forests. Based on qualitative research conducted in MSFs organized at Bale and Jamma-Urji in Oromia, Ethiopia, this paper ex...

The global community is currently grappling with multiple and overlapping social and environmental threats. These include the climate emergency, COVID-19 and the threat of widespread hunger, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity. All of these threats point to an urgent need to restore and sustainably manage land and forests. Studies are pointin...

Multistakeholder forums (MSFs) are applied in territorial planning with the goal of bringing together diverse actors in decision‐making, allowing the participation and empowerment of indigenous and local communities, protecting their territories, and promoting community‐based conservation efforts. However, important questions remain. How are territ...

Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) form an overarching framework to guide development at all scales from local to global. They are intended to holistically address sustainability across its economic, ecological and social dimensions. A core tenant of this holistic approach is that all dimensions of sustainability are interl...

This is the software used for recording the results of the strcutural analysis of mutual direct influnences between all forces of change. It includes automatic graphs for visualising the results. For detailed explanations regarding how to use it, refer to the guide to which this file is appended.

The Wicked Problem of Forest Policy - edited by William Nikolakis July 2020

From 2011–2015, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) trained field teams in Nicaragua in Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) methods. ACM is a social learning-based approach to help forest communities manage their natural resources in a more equitable and sustainable way and respond to change. This paper presents the lessons-l...

Community-based forest monitoring is seen as a way both to improve community engagement and participation in national environmental payment schemes and climate mitigation priorities and to implement reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and foster conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbo...

This research paper was created with funding and technical support of the Research Consortium on Women's Land Rights, an initiative of Resource Equity. The Research Consortium on Women's Land Rights is a community of learning and practice that works to increase the quantity and strengthen the quality of research on interventions to advance women's...

This Realist Synthesis Review (RSR) examines the scholarly literature on multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) set up to support efforts towards more sustainable land use. In this review, we focus on subnational MSFs that include at least one grassroots and one government actor. MSFs have been presented, especially by practitioners, as a panacea to addre...

The recent emphasis on the role of tropical forests in facing climate change has made forest decentralization debates more relevant than ever. Discussions on multilevel governance, polycentricity, and nested approaches to governance surround the central question, ever more pertinent considering global environmental change, of who holds the mandate...

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary tenure arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document. But this process can be time-consumi...

Forestry cannot be thought of in isolation from its relations with other sectors and other parts of people’s lives – for both the health of the forests and the well-being of forest peoples. • Forest governance and everyday management are upheld by a superstructure of gendered forest relations – invisible to mainstream forestry – that often disadvan...

Forestry cannot be thought of in isolation from its relations with other sectors and other parts of people’s lives – for both the health of the forests and the well-being of forest peoples. • Forest governance and everyday management are upheld by a superstructure of gendered forest relations – invisible to mainstream forestry – that often disadvan...

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of social learning in governing and managing land use, the understanding and practice of learning has received limited attention from researchers. In global environmental programs and projects aimed at supporting sustainable land use in developing countries, learning is often promoted but without expl...

Multi-stakeholder platforms are the subject of increasing attention and investment in the domain of natural resource management (and beyond), yet evidence-based guidance on policy and investment priorities to leverage this approach is slim. Centers engaged in PIM Flagship 5 have identified the need for a structured synthesis of lessons emerging fro...

The impact of the formalization of collective rights to land and forest in Peru is linked to a clear perception of tenure security: 80% of those surveyed consider their rights are stronger since titling, although this percentage is higher in men (85%) than women (75%). • 83% of the members of communities analysed in Madre de Dios consider that live...

Land use change is often a result of negotiation between different interests. Focusing on negotiation practices helps to provide a nuanced understanding of land use change processes over time. We examine negotiations within a concession model for land development in the southern tropical peatlands of Central Kalimantan province in Indonesia. This r...

We explore how participatory monitoring can help communities and community partners define local governance, identify governance issues and problems, and improve women’s participation, based on action research from 2011 to 2015 to improve women’s participation in decision-making in indigenous communities in Nicaragua. The findings are based on expe...