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The political ecology playbook for ecosystem restoration: Principles for effective, equitable, and transformative landscapes
Abstract
The urgency of restoring ecosystems to improve human wellbeing and mitigate climate and biodiversity crises is attracting global attention. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) is a global call to action to support the restoration of degraded ecosystems. And yet, many forest restoration efforts, for instance, have failed to meet restoration goals; indeed, they worsened social precarities and ecological conditions. By merely focusing on symptoms of forest loss and degradation, these interventions have neglected the underlying issues of equity and justice driving forest decline. To address these root causes, thus creating socially just and sustainable solutions, we develop the Political Ecology Playbook for Ecosystem Restoration. We outline a set of ten principles for achieving long-lasting, resilient, and equitable ecosystem restoration. These principles are guided by political ecology, a framework that addresses environmental concerns from a broadly political economic perspective, attending to power, politics, and equity within specific geographic and historical contexts. Drawing on the chain of explanation, this multi-scale, cross-landscapes Playbook aims to produce healthy relationships between people and nature that are ecologically, socially, and economically just – and thus sustainable and resilient – while recognizing the political nature of such relationships. We argue that the Political Ecology Playbook should guide ecosystem restoration worldwide.
... Previous studies reveal both the necessity and limitations of community-based restoration for addressing ecological crises (Menz et al. 2013, Mace et al. 2018, Usher 2023. The necessarily social determination of ecosystem baselines and need to live in and with restored landscapes highlight the importance of community participation for successful and just restoration (Perring et al. 2018, Osborne et al. 2021, Usher 2023). However, community-based restoration often occurs at the site scale, determined by socio-political boundaries, and lacks the spatial extent and ecological connectivity needed to improve biodiversity outcomes (Menz et al. 2013, Norton et al. 2018, Usher 2023. ...
... In light of these limitations, there are growing calls to scale community-based restoration (Norton et al. 2018, Perring et al 2018, Kockel et al. 2020, Mumaw and Raymond 2021. Although many calls focus on scaling up restoration to larger spatial scales, others highlight the need to better coordinate action, address key drivers of degradation, and engage a wider range of communities and sociocultural objectives (Norton et al. 2016, Osborne et al. 2021, Usher 2023. ...
... Finally, scaling can be achieved by "amplifying beyond" the initiative, by changing the rules, values, norms, knowledge, and mindsets within which restoration takes place. This emphasis on changing societal norms echoes the growing calls to attend to restoration's social outcomes and the plurality of values involved (Osborne et al. 2021), though processes of social and institutional change are infrequently discussed in the restoration literature (Usher 2023). ...
... In many cases, unsuitable species are selected for planting (Coleman et al. 2021;Naia et al. 2021), which can result in low biodiversity of restoration-dominated landscapes (Holl et al. 2022). On the social side, inflexible or short-sighted governance structures can slow restoration activities or promote misplaced restoration goals (Jepson 2022), and restoration projects face complex questions surrounding equity and inclusive participation Osborne et al. 2021). Finally, a lack of adaptive capacity and resilience to complex social-ecological threats can jeopardize the longterm sustainability of restoration efforts (Dudney et al. 2022;Frietsch et al. 2023). ...
... Yet, focusing primarily on one dimension of an intertwined social-ecological system-be it the social or ecological dimension-is bound to result in suboptimal outcomes for the system as a whole (Walker & Salt 2006). In addition, a strong focus on the local scale can lead to unintended negative interactions with processes occurring at larger spatial scales, because restored sites are connected to a global web of resource use, funding, and policies Osborne et al. 2021). ...
... Many restoration interventions are shaped by unequal power relations that determine which activities are prioritized, whose knowledge is included in decision-making, and how resources, benefits, and opportunity costs are distributed (Mansourian 2018;Elias et al. 2021). This can result in restoration interventions that are not aligned with social and ecological local realities (Osborne et al. 2021) and that perpetuate the marginalization of local communities (Löfqvist et al. 2022). Such lack of accounting for local communities is problematic not only from a justice perspective, but can also lead to a lack of identification of local communities with the restoration project, which in turn can cause the unsustainable exploitation of restored sites as soon as those managing the intervention leave or funding runs out (N15). ...
The restoration of degraded ecosystems is considered a key strategy to contribute to ecological integrity and human well‐being. To support restoration practice, 10 “Principles to guide the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030” were conceived through a consultative process and put forward by a group of leading international restoration actors. The extent to which these principles can inform successful restoration activities on the ground, however, remains largely unknown. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, we probed 32 stakeholders who plan, manage, and implement restoration in Rwanda to elicit which factors they perceive as most important for successful restoration based on the UN Decade principles. Using the Q‐methodology, we discovered that participants overall agreed that the UN Decade principles are relevant to inform successful ecosystem restoration in the study area. Further, the Q‐study revealed three distinct groups of stakeholders with different priorities in terms of opinions on restoration aims, stakeholder involvement, and relevant spatial scales. Based on semi‐structured interviews, we identified four considerations for successful restoration that require special attention in future restoration interventions in the study area: (1) restoring historical conditions, (2) collecting baseline data, (3) increasing local communities' sense of ownership, and (4) pursuing a long‐term vision for restoration activities. To address these considerations and thereby harvest the potential of ecosystem restoration to benefit both people and nature in the long run, diverse stakeholders with different priorities for restoration need to come together to discuss possible differences in their perceived priorities, perspectives, and approaches.
... Restoring degraded tropical peatland in Indonesia is particularly difficult owing to the ecological complexity of tropical peatland ecosystems, sociopolitical dynamics such as weak and overlapping tenurial claims and regulatory regimes (McCarthy 2000, Uda et al. 2017, Purnomo et al. 2019, Januar et al. 2021, the prevalence of marginalised livelihoods on degraded peatland (Silvianingsih et al. 2020, Yuwati et al. 2021) and lack of agreement over a definition or vision for success (Dohong et al. 2017, Harrison et al. 2020, Puspitaloka et al. 2020. Recent literature has called for restoration to ensure social inclusivity, not only by balancing social and ecological principles, but also by considering the needs of those most marginalised (Osborne et al. 2021, Robinson et al. 2021, Elias et al. 2022. While broad restoration principles are invaluable, there has been less work on detailing a process for collaboratively identifying and conceptualising a shared restoration vision (Walpole et al. 2017), and even less on tropical peatland restoration in Indonesia or elsewhere. ...
... However, there is a growing recognition that interdisciplinary approaches, integrating both natural and social science perspectives, are necessary to develop comprehensive and sustainable strategies (Graham 2013, Thornton 2017, Uda et al. 2017, Thornton et al. 2020, Fleming et al. 2021, Mishra et al. 2021. This shift aligns with broader calls for adopting a social-ecological approach to restoration (Fernández-Manjarrés et al. 2018, Osborne et al. 2021, Elias et al. 2022. ...
... Another comment emphasised the need to ensure that a thorough consent-seeking process is undertaken to secure approval for canal blocking from canal users, to ensure that no negative impact on livelihoods is introduced with canal blockingdetail was added to specify that consent would be obtained and canal users appropriately compensated. The revised vision sets out a relatively comprehensive desired future state incorporating both social and ecological elements of restoration, centred around creating conditions for a 'thriving, abundant future' for all forms of life that actively involves local communities (Osborne et al. 2021, page 3). Each part or element of the system articulated in the vision triggers or activates another, all of which are crucial for successful peatland restoration. ...
In this article we propose and apply a methodology for collaboratively creating and reaching agreement over a shared vision for peatland restoration. The purpose is to identify a shared understanding of the various parts of a just, inclusive and sustainable restored peatland as well as productive tensions between and across divergent disciplinary domains focused on peatland restoration. We involved an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners working on various aspects of tropical peatland restoration and management in Indonesia, where there is a recognised need for clearer goals and/or definitions of restoration outcomes to focus manifold stakeholder efforts. To increase opportunities for participation and interaction between participants, our methodology built on and adapted a well-established Delphi survey method by combining it with focus group discussions. This allowed multiple points of view to be considered and new knowledge to emerge. The vision produced through this process bridges across different disciplinary tensions to fulfil ecological and social outcomes. While the vision is specific to the complex political economic and socio-ecological context of Indonesia's tropical peatland, the phased methodology for collaborative visioning can be adapted for application to other social ecological challenges, or to guide planning and practice by other stakeholder groups aiming to articulate a desired future state.
... For instance, many local communities value direct benefits such as fuel, food, or fodder, while many facilitating agencies prioritise conservation outcomes, such as increase in tree cover and/or sustainable development (Ota et al. 2020. For restoration to deliver its intended range of outcomes, a good understanding of how people will engage with and impact restoration outcomes is recommended , Osborne et al. 2021, Elias et al. 2022, Yuwono et al. 2023. Documenting what drives landholder engagement in forest restoration is imperative to improve the adoption of forest restoration initiatives and design initiatives that are likely to scale. ...
... Our sample is also not representative, thus our results should not be generalized. However, this paper provides landholders' perspectives on engagement with restoration initiatives that are imperative for the success of restoration projects, contributing to the critically needed insights for restoration science and practice (Elias et al. 2021, Osborne et al. 2021. Future research could include the role of finance in restoration scaling, studying the potential of integrating agroforestry products into existing supply chains or integrating smallholders into incentive mechanisms such as carbon markets, which are currently better suited for large landowners. ...
... Provisioning and sport-oriented recreational fishers have different relationships to power and political processes (Kadfak & Oskarsson, 2020;Osborne et al., 2021). We hypothesize that these power differences between fishers are not only due to differing motivations but also to material and structural conditions, including, but not limited to, (1) asymmetries in socioeconomic status, gender, race, and class of individual fishers, (2) uneven distribution of privilege, costs, and benefits among groups of fishers, and (3) conditions tied to colonization, legislative frameworks and other political-economic processes (Bavington et al., 2004;Osborne et al., 2021;Robbins, 2012). ...
... Provisioning and sport-oriented recreational fishers have different relationships to power and political processes (Kadfak & Oskarsson, 2020;Osborne et al., 2021). We hypothesize that these power differences between fishers are not only due to differing motivations but also to material and structural conditions, including, but not limited to, (1) asymmetries in socioeconomic status, gender, race, and class of individual fishers, (2) uneven distribution of privilege, costs, and benefits among groups of fishers, and (3) conditions tied to colonization, legislative frameworks and other political-economic processes (Bavington et al., 2004;Osborne et al., 2021;Robbins, 2012). There is, thus, a need to investigate how these power imbalances between provisioning and recreational fishers relate to broader societal phenomena, such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and centralization of power in governance (Bogert et al., 2022;Svarstad et al., 2018). ...
Although sparse, increasing evidence suggests an overlooked population of fishers whose fishing motivations and outcomes overlap across commercial, subsistence and recreational fishing sectors, resulting in underrepresented groups of fishers in management and policy frameworks. These fishers participate in what we frame as “provisioning fisheries,” a concept we propose to highlight the underrepresented values from fishing and fisheries across recreational, sociocultural, psychological, economic, health, and nutritional dimensions. We argue that provisioning fisheries often support underserved groups, provisioning fishers may engage in informal markets, and, that distinction exists from sport-oriented recreational fisheries in power, risks, access barriers, fishing motivation, attitudes, and practices including rule and advisory awareness. We propose that provisioning fisheries should be consciously considered—whether as part of existing fisheries structures or even its own sector to promote more sustainable and inclusive fisheries management. Overlooking this population of fishers may risk further marginalization, conflicts, contaminant exposure, and inaccurate stock estimates. Therefore, we propose provisioning fisheries as a useful analytical category to explore the heterogeneity of fishers and their distinct needs, motivations, and behaviors. As an example of how these fisheries may function, we synthesize what we currently know about provisioning fisheries in North America with hypothesized differences between provisioning and the sport-oriented recreational fisher to encourage greater dialogue and investigation about underrecognized fisheries.
... As an intervention, restoration can also alter human relations to the ecologies they value, live with, or depend on. Critical restoration scholarship has pointed out the risk of restoration becoming a new form of ecological imperialism that perpetuates rather than combats exploitation as the root cause of ecological degradation (Gibbs et al. 2021;Morrison et al. 2022;Osborne et al. 2021). Particularly with the current push to scale up and accelerate restoration efforts driven by growing threats of global environmental crises, there is a tendency to reshape ecologies in the Global South and (formerly) colonized places according to Western values and technical expertise, sidelining situated knowledge and practices of care (Gibbs et al. 2021). ...
... However, the interests of these private actors are also oriented toward accumulation and the distribution of capital that can conflict with the social and ecological sustainability necessary for effective restoration practice. Conflicting economic and ecological agendas can lead to "placebo" restoration projects or "greenwashing" that can have the optics of successful environmental management but in reality may be non-transformative and deflect attention away from root causes driving environmental degradation (Gibbs et al. 2021;Morrison et al. 2022;Osborne et al. 2021. A better understanding of how these actors influence restoration can potentially contribute to more socially equitable and ecologically effective ways of integrating private sector actors into this space. ...
Ecological restoration practices and technologies are emerging as a dominant tool for addressing global environmental crises. This shift in conservation from a protectionist paradigm to a more hands-on approach signifies a new era of active intervention to the repair of ecosystems. Such approaches demand novel forms of human participation, fostering new kinds of relations, practices, values, and assumptions of what is “natural.” This special issue brings together reviews reflecting the diversity of perspectives and questions raised by social scientists on the practice of ecological restoration, restoration technologies, and restoration logics. Together they reveal three interconnected themes: (1) Politics are inherent to restoration practices of care and repair, raising questions about the logics and values that drive restoration, and the kinds of natures these generate. (2) Restoration is embedded in historical and social-political contexts, reflecting ongoing discussions on the implications of restoration in terms of environmental justice and equity. (3) Restoration is a relational practice that engages human–ecological entanglement and responsibility as central for the repair of social ecologies.
... Proof Review Only -Not For Distribution of the regulation of restoration cannot be divorced from legal systems that facilitate land degradation. Until state institutions address the underlying causes of land degradation, recovery will continue to be impeded by ongoing extraction and regulatory systems for recovery will not be able to effect the objective they are seeking (Osborne et al. 2021;Bliss and Fischer 2011;Elias, Joshi, and Meinzen-Dick 2021). Second, it follows that state institutions seek to legitimize and continue land-degrading activities. ...
... In the context of the regulation of ecological restoration, this means privileging local knowledge and practices and supporting common property arrangements (Osborne et al. 2021) along with respecting the rights and agency of the non-human to flourish. It also means preventing and dismantling private markets from developing economic rights to ecological restoration and the insistence on public funding for restorative activities. ...
... An environmental justice framework is useful when identifying and assessing an RET project's impacts, especially on local, poor, and marginalized communities [11]. In our view, promoting environmental justice is essential for ensuring potential environmental and social issues are addressed before RET development and that a policy-oriented framework with restorative justice principles may aid a global effort toward ensuring a just renewable energy transition [12,13]. ...
... Indeed, some of the most frequently reported impacts due to this acquisition ( Table 4) include loss of biodiversity and landscape (environmental), exposure to radiation and visual impacts (health) and loss of sense of place, culture, and attachment (social). These findings are consistent with many reported and published examples of environmental injustice literature [1,13,33,[114][115][116][117][118]. ...
A global transition toward a sustainable energy system, incorporating for example Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs), is essential for decarbonizing electricity production, meeting energy demands, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. However, the growing scale of renewable energy development has exacerbated local environmental and social challenges; improper assessment of RETs has led to recorded conflicts and resource injustice in transitioning communities. The purpose of this study is to analyze global cases of renewable energy development resulting in conflict and environmental injustice, and to propose Critical Restoration Geography (CRG) as a framework strategizing for pre-emptive avoidance of RET-related injustices. Evidence of global environmental injustice in RET development was explored using recorded conflicts from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas). We synthesized global variations in affected demographics, land area and conflict resolution with respect to achievement of environmental justice by RET type (wind, solar, biomass, geothermal). Based on analysis of GEJA's 102 recorded cases of RET-related environmental (in)justice from 2001 to 2021, justice was either not achieved or ambiguous in 55 and 20 cases. Drivers for these injustices include displacement of Indigenous communities, exclusion of communities from decision making processes, and protection of business interests over biodiversity and community needs. The proposed CRG framework details seven principles for avoiding environmental injustice in global RET development; including recognition and deconstruction of power dynamics, incorporation of multiple knowledge systems, and promotion of social justice. These principles serve to inform environmentally just approaches to policymaking for future RET development in any geographical context.
... The dimensions of political ecology are also interrelated. Mining and political ecology connect natural, ecological, social, and economic sustainability [22]. ...
... The qualitative method used in this research uses qualitative content analysis. Qualitative content analysis is a text processing evaluation method used in the context of social science research projects to enhance data collection, for example open interviews [22]. The following is an explanation of the profession along with the duties and responsibilities of each research source. ...
... We believe that better integration of social science in conservation practice and policy will create greater opportunities for respectful dialogues and shared learning to forge more just and sustainable approaches to environmental stewardship. There is a great deal of scholarship that offers tools and frameworks to elucidate and address social pressures and opportunities in the context of biodiversity conservation and restoration to ensure effective and equitable environmental interventions (e.g., Elias et al., 2021;Fleischman et al., 2020;Osborne et al., 2021). Likewise, there is a broader opportunity here to break away from the social-natural dichotomy (admittedly perpetuated in some discussions herein) and refocus on more integrative approaches, such as biocultural and convivial conservation (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020;Gavin et al., 2015Gavin et al., , 2018. ...
Although the importance of social science to conservation practice and policy is well accepted, social scientists remain in the minority in conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We explored how social science has started to inform the work of WWT, an NGO dedicated to the restoration of wetlands for people and nature. Through reflections on our experiences working in WWT's social dimensions unit and interviews with colleagues from different backgrounds and roles, we critically reflected on the integration of social science in wetland conservation science, advocacy, and practice. Social science was a relatively new and marginal research domain for WWT. There was confusion within the organization around what social science entails and its value for conservation practice. We and our colleagues have faced challenges communicating across disciplines and establishing a rigorous ethical review process for social science research. It is difficult to navigate under a scarcity mindset in conservation (i.e., that there is not enough time, resources, or funding) and at the same time to build collaborations and long‐term relationships and contribute to wider environmental and social movements. Social science integration brought multiple opportunities to WWT, including creating and showing impact, building support, and broadening funding opportunities. Social science was seen to inform campaigns and wetland restoration policy. Further integration of social science is needed at WWT. To achieve this, we recommend building confidence in the role of social science across teams through further training to improve organizational competency in social science theory and methods. We emphasize the need for thoughtful, long‐term approaches alongside shorter term approaches to wetland restoration. We recommend that conservation NGOs promote practices of self‐reflection to recognize the inherently political nature of conservation. We expect that our experiences and recommendations are relevant for other organizations. We invite other perspectives and hope our reflections lead to further conversations in the conservation sector.
... The last decade has seen a rapid growth in policies aiming to increase global forest cover, including Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Bonn Challenge, New Generation Plantations, Forest Landscape Restoration, the Kew Declaration, and the UN decade on Ecosystem Restoration (Agrawal et al., 2011;Bastin et al., 2019;Duchelle et al., 2018;Erbaugh & Oldekop, 2018;Hawes, 2018;Laestadius et al., 2015;Silva et al., 2019;The Bonn Challenge, 2016;The Declaration Drafting Committee, 2021). Ecological restoration has the potential to make a substantial contribution to protecting biodiversity, storing carbon in the biosphere, and improving human well-being (Bastin et al., 2019;Cook-Patton et al., 2021;Erbaugh et al., 2020;Löfqvist et al., 2023;Mo et al., 2023;Strassburg et al., 2020;Walker et al., 2022), yet these programs have been accompanied by significant controversy over potential biophysical and social impacts (Chomba et al., 2016;Ece et al., 2017;Fleischman et al., 2022;Fleischman, Basant, et al., 2020;Löfqvist et al., 2023;Osborne et al., 2021;Ribot & Larson M, 2012;Sacco et al., 2021;Schultz et al., 2022;Veldman et al., 2015Veldman et al., , 2017. While some view restoration as a revolutionary new paradigm for environmental management (Mansourian et al., 2021), others see restoration as the repackaging of old programs in new framing (Djenontin et al., 2020) much as earlier initiatives such as REDD+ also consisted of repackaging old programs to fit new development paradigms (Lund et al., 2017). ...
Societal Impact Statement
India has a long history of planting trees to restore ecosystem services providing an opportunity to evaluate long‐term ecosystem restoration processes. We show that these programs have shifted over time in response to public demands as well as through changes in the government's vision for forests. These shifts point towards opportunities and limits for political responsiveness in the design and implementation of restoration programs. Independent evaluations have shown that the tree planting programs we study often fail to achieve their goals, raising questions about their benefits, and risks from positioning tree planting as a panacea for social and environmental problems.
Summary
Aims: Interest in forest restoration has increased in recent years with the goal of increasing carbon storage, protecting biodiversity, and improving the delivery of ecosystem services to aid rural livelihoods. However, there is little systematic analysis of how this trend relates to broader histories of landscape interventions.
Methods: We analyze a dataset comprising 36 years of government plantation records from the forest department of the Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh.
Findings: Restoration‐oriented tree planting peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with heavy domestic funding. Counter to dominant policy narratives, most plantation programs did not formally involve the participation of local people and were not funded by donors or carbon markets. Over time, planting shifted away from commercial timber species towards a more diverse set of native broadleaf species, reflecting local preferences for the production of firewood, fodder, and other non‐timber forest products and ecosystem services as well as changing conceptions by government agencies about what and who a forest is meant to serve. Over time, the number of programs sponsoring tree planting has proliferated, reflecting the ways that tree planting has been framed as the solution to a growing number of problems, ranging from poverty alleviation to climate adaptation.
Conclusion: The current global focus on forest restoration and nature‐based climate solutions represents a reframing of long‐existing policies and programs in this region. As with past policy changes, restoration practices are likely to be influenced by long‐term histories, entrenched practices, and local political influences.
... The dominance of natural capital accounting that privileges economic relations over alternative forms of socio-environmental relations is not inevitable (Usher 2023). Recent scholarship has offered a vision of alternative socio-natural relations formed via differing engagements with ecological repair, moving beyond techno-managerial anthropocentric visions ( Barra 2024;Osborne et al. 2021;Webber et al. 2022). As Mark Usher writes, "restoration can therefore encourage humans to recognize that worlds can be arranged differently and composed otherwise" (2023:1257). ...
Amphibious landscapes, wetlands such as coasts, mangroves, peatlands, and deltas, have seen a recent surge in large-scale restoration efforts. This article examines this trend in Southeast Asia, reviewing the history and contemporary dynamics of wetland restoration in the region. Drawing from literatures on the political ecology of restoration, infrastructure studies, and the financialization of nature, we understand wetland restoration as a form of repair to highlight it as a socio-political process. We conceptualize restoration as infrastructural land repair , the process of restoring dynamic ecosystems for specific anthropocentric and economic aims, mediated through an amalgam of expertise, technology, and finance. We reveal how restoration can function as a socio-ecological fix, maintaining the same political-economic systems that initially caused wetland degradation. Finally, we identify a need for three areas of scholarship to be expanded on how restoration unfolds in practice within the SEA context, which will be crucial to informing more reparative forms of restoration.
... Where resilience thinking has faced scrutiny for its limited attention to power structures and relationships [12], political ecology has increasingly been recognized as a potential complementary framework to investigate power dynamics in human-environment interactions. As an explanatory field, political ecology frames social-ecological systems as complex, power-laden spaces [78] where political legacies and equity issues intersect in particular geographic and historical settings [18,79]. By framing social-ecological systems in this way, political ecology suggests that wicked problems are not solely the result of unsustainable practices by certain communities or organizations. ...
This paper explores the use of power and politics in empirical literature on social-ecological traps. Social-ecological traps describe conditions where self-reinforcing interactions between social and ecological elements perpetuate a system in an unfavorable or undesirable state. Researchers across disciplines have theorized the nature and composition of social-ecological traps. In this connection, critical viewpoints on resilience have recognized a growing need to investigate political context, power relations, and the unequal distribution of risks and benefits contributing to the capacity of communities to manage changing conditions. However, it remains unclear to what extent empirical studies support any theorized way of power and politics influencing trap dynamics. This paper reviews power dynamics in the existing literature and offers insight into how power influences the emergence and persistence of social-ecological traps. Through a systematic literature review, we examined how the concept of power has been used, explicitly and implicitly, in empirical social-ecological trap research. The review identified 40 publications, focusing mainly on coastal ecosystems and cultivated areas within Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. Our results suggest that power is still poorly understood from both a conceptual and operational perspective within the social-ecological trap literature. A few studies that do center power in their analyses demonstrate that despite limited attention, there are clear instances where power intersects with social-ecological system dynamics to perpetuate resilient, yet undesirable outcomes. We point to the absence of empirical studies that systematically analyze power relationships and dynamics and highlight the need for further research that bridges socio-political and ecological analyses.
... Restoration efforts can reconnect these fragmented habitats, creating wildlife corridors that allow species to move freely between different areas (Davis et al., 2022). and help in sustaining biodiversity amidst climate change and other stressors (Osborne et al., 2021). ...
Conservation ecology represents one of the most pressing challenges in the twenty-first century. Growing population and consequent land-use changes cost significant economic losses every year. Thus, conserving biodiversity becomes essential not just for maintaining the stability of global systems but also for securing the long-term interests of the economy. Conservation biology is riddled with sociopolitical issues. Biodiversity conservation is a complex and multifaceted process that often requires careful coordination and continued support from various stakeholders. The logistics of conserving biodiversity become more complicated over time. The circular economy, which aims to reduce resource use and waste by re-circulating products and materials, can contribute directly to these actions. This review explores the intersection of the circular economy (CE) and ecological restoration, emphasizing their synergy in promoting sustainable environmental practices and stewardship. The circular economy, focusing on resource efficiency, waste reduction, and regenerative practices, offers a robust framework for addressing ecological degradation and biodiversity loss. By designing products for longevity, repairability, and recyclability, a circular economy reduces resource extraction pressures, conserving habitats and maintaining ecosystem integrity. Regenerative practices such as forestry and habitat restoration enhance soil fertility, sequester carbon, and improve biodiversity, contributing to resilient agricultural ecosystems. Innovation and collaboration among businesses, governments, and communities are central to advancing sustainable technologies and practices, which support restoration efforts and ensure broad-based implementation. Using suitable case studies, we present various ways CE may contribute to conservation efforts.
... It has been argued that ecological restoration can combat the drivers of homelessness and support equitable development by focusing on ecosystem services and natural capital (Aronson et al., 2006). While historically ecological restoration emphasized ecological integrity and historical fidelity, today it is commonly recognized that traditional ecological restoration practices are limited in the face of complex social-ecological issues (Osborne et al., 2021;Palomar, 2010). Although many have touted its potential to offer a positive practice for expressly recognizing humanity's interaction and involvement with natural systems (Higgs, 2003(Higgs, , 1997Jordan, 1993), when armed primarily with conventional technocratic frameworks and mental models, practitioners and managers are often caught in the fray of the complexity without the tools necessary to address the root causes of degradation, let alone the complex systems challenge of homelessness (Phillips et al., 2009). ...
The complex social-ecological dynamics of homelessness in natural resource management have become increasingly apparent in recent years. Systematically understanding and engaging with these dynamics across sectors, disciplines, and landscapes has presented a conceptual and methodological challenge for both practitioners and researchers. Though some interdisciplinary research has expanded in recent years, the understanding it has fostered largely remains fragmented across disciplines, and its implications for practice are poorly understood. To help create connections across this fragmented dialogue, we reviewed 111 relevant academic journal articles, books, and reports across a broad range of disciplines. Across this literature, we observed an increasing focus on understanding homelessness drivers, impacts, and solutions through a coupled social-ecological systems lens, though key gaps remain. Research oriented towards urban studies, environmental justice, public health, political ecology, and Indigenous studies offered especially important methodological and conceptual innovations that promise to better confront and address justice in fluid, dynamic, and integrated social-ecological systems. We discuss opportunities for studies to better incorporate community concerns, attend to heterogenous homeless populations, apply multiple scales of analysis across disciplines, address market forces, incorporate diverse worldviews and researcher reflexivity, and address complex social-ecological challenges like climate change. To help mobilize around these needs and opportunities, we encourage researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experiences of homelessness to co-produce a research agenda, a process which could establish a shared foundation for increased collaboration across sectors and disciplines and identify priorities for better understanding and attending to the complex and contested challenges of homelessness across landscapes.
... However, the challenge lies in designing and implementing projects and processes that respect the interconnectedness between social and ecological needs. Pascual et al. [22] and Osborne et al. [23] highlight this point by acknowledging the challenge of integrating the many dimensions of equity into restoration endeavours, especially when economic efficiency is prioritized. The financial boundary condition is a key dimension that Cao et al. [24] also explore, arguing that "scientists have largely ignored the inherent tensions underlying these contrasting goals". ...
... Understanding historical disturbances and social-political drivers of ecosystem changes can help to support a shared understanding of a social-ecological system, including how differently positioned people have adapted their livelihoods in response (Choi 2007). This supports the development of realistic, resilience-oriented future scenarios that account for social and ecological realities (Choi 2007;Osborne et al. 2021). ...
Collaboration is critical for engaging stakeholders and integrating diverse knowledges in social‐ecological restoration. Yet, despite the recognized benefits, ecosystem restoration has often not been collaborative across social and ecological disciplines or across different stakeholder scales. Drawing on relevant literature and practice‐based knowledge derived from our respective experiences working on the restoration of Indonesia's tropical peatlands, we emphasize the need for equitable task distribution; mutually beneficial, trust‐based relationships; inclusive and safe collaborative environments; scrutinizing and redressing power inequalities; establishing a shared understanding of, and vision for, social‐ecological contexts targeted for restoration; meeting on‐site and engaging with place‐based knowledge; and centering Indigenous and local knowledge. Putting in place these interconnected elements can contribute to a more integrated, equitable, adapted, sustained, and impactful collaboration for social‐ecological restoration.
... This reference is often only defined by basic abiotic properties and a few key community indices such as plant species composition. Scientists, stakeholders, and politicians, however, agree that we need broader restoration goals if we are to properly measure restoration success 6 . This is especially the case for restoration guidelines for ecosystems such as agricultural soils where severe former or continued disturbance disables returning the location to a pristine reference ecosystem 7 . ...
Soils are the backbone of terrestrial ecosystems, underpinning their biodiversity and functioning. They are also key to agricultural production and ecosystem development. Although focus on effective and profitable food production has led to severely degraded soils, the tools and standards for restoration strategies in agricultural soils are still largely underdeveloped. In this review, we summarize recent developments in ecological restoration practice for soils, evaluate whether these are in line with ecological theory, identify where they could be improved, and contextualize these to agricultural soil restoration. We identify restoration actions and success indicators that may best foster sustainable use of agricultural soils while also increasing their multifunctionality, that is their ability to simultaneously supply multiple ecosystem services including provisioning food and feed. Lastly, we explore actions available to improve soil health and focus on tool and indicator implementation. Calls for reductions in provisioning services, such as yield production, commonly used in ecological restoration practices conflict most directly with wider soil-ecosystem-service-focused restoration actions, including supporting and regulating services. Comprehensive restoration actions harnessing the interdependence of multiple soil properties, including contribution to vegetative yield, appear to be most efficient in agricultural settings with a central role of soil biodiversity in ecosystem service provisioning.
... In response to these initiatives, countries have made ambitious pledges to restore millions of hectares of land 10,11 . However, the drive to meet ambitious national-level targets often eclipses careful assessment of restoration opportunities, failing to fully account for social-ecological contexts, including challenges related to biophysical, governance, or equity issues, among others 12,13 . Globally, there has been a rush to generate maps depicting restoration opportunities 14,15 , arguably in response to calls to produce usable science to inform various policies 16 . ...
Ecosystem restoration is widely recognized as a key strategy to address social-ecological challenges. National governments have pledged to restore millions of hectares of land. However, the ability to accomplish these pledges remains opaque, because restoration efforts are influenced by complex social-ecological factors. We provide a global analysis of national-level enabling and hindering conditions and their relation to restoration pledges undertaken by different nations. We developed an archetype characterization of within-country conditions using biophysical, socio-economic and governance indicators. Additionally, we investigated between-country conditions by examining flows of embodied land. Our analysis suggests that the countries with the most ambitious restoration pledges also tend to have the weakest enabling conditions (and vice versa). These results highlight the need to account for social, economic and governance factors alongside biophysical factors when considering where restoration ought to take place.
... One of the roles of the historical political ecology approach is to understand how preexisting livelihoods and natural environments have been affected by external forces such as colonialism, capitalism, globalization, and development (Roberts, 2021). For example, this approach can help us understand how indigenous communities have been affected by the changes brought about by colonial expansion (Brisbois et al., 2021), resource extraction and land dispossession (Turner & Robbins, 2008), and cultural assimilation (Montero-Rosado et al., 2023), and how local ecological knowledge and practices have been marginalized or incorporated into dominant forms of environmental exploitation exploitations (Osborne et al., 2021). By tracing the historical roots of environmental problems and conflicts, this approach can also help us identify the actors and interests involved, current and future trajectories of environmental change, and potential solutions and alternatives (Mathevet et al., 2015;Siman & Niewiarowski, 2023). ...
The continuous encroachment of highland cultivators into the lower Didessa River Valley in west Ethiopia since the mid-20th century has brought environmental, economic, and social changes. This study aimed to depict land use changes and their subsequent impacts on preexisting livelihoods and the environment. The travelers' records, structured interviews with the local communities, and various documents were collected and analyzed qualitatively. The study revealed that the intensified systems of surplus production since 1950 have remarkable and distinct historical political ecology features and impacts by displacing preexisting livelihood systems and reshaping the social and environmental settings in the valley. Thus, (re)considering policies and programs is important to realize sustainable development in the valley. Moreover, further multidisciplinary research is necessary to understand land use systems and the ecological situations of the Mecha Oromo and Nilotes when planning interventions in the valley. INTRODUCTION This paper seeks to explicate how the change in mode of production affected preexisting livelihoods and the natural environment in the lower Didessa River valley from 1950 to 2008. From the mid-20 th century, the valley experienced agricultural expansion by agricultural settlers, the state, and several large commercial farmers. They cultivated the valley, which is largely forest ecology sparsely settled and extremely fertile soil. The term 'settler' (late comers, plough cultivators) has been used for farmers who migrated from nearby or far regions in search of land and became numerically dominant over local people (the Nilotes and Oromo). Cultivators came with diverse farm operations that utilized the natural resources in different ways. They introduced a mode of production that was contrary to preexisting systems in terms of type and intensity of practices. The theme of this study is that when people move from one environment to another with differing methods of production, there have been consequences for both themselves and the new environment in which they have settled in Arokiasamy and Tamah (2021). The case of lowland provides a good model for how people understand the environment and the effects of failure to consider local economies and dynamics in resource relations. In 1882, a Dutch traveler, Juan Maria Schuver wrote that the region was "wilderness" and was a "reception area" for the Gumuz people escaping for security from imperial pressures as well as internal conflicts. He described that these external and internal pressures in the regions north of the Blue Nile River forced the Gumuz to move south of the rivers and eastward across the Didessa River to its confluence with the Angar River between 1880 and 1920 (Wendy et al., 1996). However, Schuver did not provide details on the lower Didessa. Among the earliest records on the agricultural and environmental settings of the valley were an account by Alexander Bulatovich, a Russian advisor to Ethiopia. During his tour of the valley in
... Political ecologists have illuminated how culture, tradition, and ideology shape people's experiences of landscapes (Tuan 1977;Cosgrove and Petts 1990;Peet and Watts 1996;West 2016), and have drawn attention to how market structures shape practices of environmental use and management (Smith 2008;Blaikie and Brookfield 2015;Rocheleau 2008;Wyborn et al. 2021). An enduring theme has been the contest between "commensurable" ways of grasping how people relate to the environment (e.g., as conceived through monetary value) and the intangible, moral, and incommensurable character of people's relationships with particular environments (Bigger and Robertson 2017;Osborne et al. 2021). ...
... One of the roles of the historical political ecology approach is to understand how preexisting livelihoods and natural environments have been affected by external forces such as colonialism, capitalism, globalization, and development (Roberts, 2021). For example, this approach can help us understand how indigenous communities have been affected by the changes brought about by colonial expansion (Brisbois et al., 2021), resource extraction and land dispossession (Turner & Robbins, 2008), and cultural assimilation (Montero-Rosado et al., 2023), and how local ecological knowledge and practices have been marginalized or incorporated into dominant forms of environmental exploitation exploitations (Osborne et al., 2021). By tracing the historical roots of environmental problems and conflicts, this approach can also help us identify the actors and interests involved, current and future trajectories of environmental change, and potential solutions and alternatives (Mathevet et al., 2015;Siman & Niewiarowski, 2023). ...
The continuous encroachment of highland cultivators into the lower Didessa River Valley in west Ethiopia
since the mid-20th century has brought environmental, economic, and social changes. This study aimed to
depict land use changes and their subsequent impacts on preexisting livelihoods and the environment. The
travelers’ records, structured interviews with the local communities, and various documents were collected
and analyzed qualitatively. The study revealed that the intensified systems of surplus production since 1950
have remarkable and distinct historical political ecology features and impacts by displacing preexisting
livelihood systems and reshaping the social and environmental settings in the valley. Thus, (re)considering
policies and programs is important to realize sustainable development in the valley. Moreover, further
multi-disciplinary research is necessary to understand land use systems and the ecological situations of the
Mecha Oromo and Nilotes when planning interventions in the valley.
... Murphy et al., 2022;Puupponen et al., 2022), forest protection (Lo, 2021), renewable energy siting (e.g. Cambou, 2020) and ecological restoration (Osborne et al., 2021;Erbaugh et al., 2020;Anguelovski and Corbera 2023). Despite this, we lack a structured understanding of how rural places and people fit into just and sustainable futures (Borras Jr and Franco, 2018). ...
... It is therefore crucial that GBI and restoration discourses (and practice) systematically address social justice issues, particularly in Global South cities marked by stark environmental injustice legacies. In that sense, we echo the calls about the dangers of technocratic and depoliticized resilience, greening, and restoration agendas, as well as the importance of revaluing the role of citizen and environmental activism in shaping sustainable cities for people and non-human living beings (Osborne et al. 2021;Pearsall and Anguelovski 2016;Quimbayo Ruiz 2018). ...
While urban river restoration has become mainstream in the Global North, it remains scarce in Latin America, where most literature focuses on water quality, stream habitats, and watershed assessment, but planning and implementation lag behind. Colombia is undergoing a paradigm shift after pioneering the integration of green and blue infrastructure (GBI) into urban planning in the early 2000s (namely Estructura Ecológica Principal). A surge in river renaturalization initiatives is underway, with large and intermediate cities planning and executing projects. We systematically assessed the integration of rivers and GBI into local policies (Planes de Ordenamiento Territorial) and found widespread and strong recognition of streams, wetlands, and ecosystem services in urban planning, higher than previously reported. Most cities emphasize river multifunctionality, ecological connectivity, public space, and recreation, as well as disaster risk reduction, advancing toward sustainable urban water and drainage systems. However, significant gaps persist regarding climate change resilience, participation, and social justice. In a region marked by high inequality, pre-existing spatial exclusion could be amplified by urban renewal, greening, and tourism due to unfair resettlement conditions and gentrification. Such trade-offs can undermine the ecological and social benefits of restoration. We highlight the crucial role of civil society and grassroots activism in protecting and defending urban commons and conclude by recommending a critical examination of GBI and river restoration efforts in Latin America. Colombia’s case can serve as both a reference and a cautionary tale for other cities in the region to achieve outcomes that promote equity and justice amid pressing social and environmental challenges.
... A related body of work proposes frameworks for improving the relationality of conservation/CBNRM projects (Bennett et al. 2017), for example, ethical principles for relations between funding/ implementing organisations and communities (e.g. Armitage Social relations and community wellbeing in conservation projects / 5 et al. 2020) and discussions on improving conservation practices to be more socially, ecologically, and economically just at the community level (Osborne et al. 2021;Pasgaard et al. 2017). One paper argues for broadening the concept of ecosystem services to include human relationality, specifically advocating for funding/implementing organisations to meaningfully engage with stakeholders and rights holders for more equitable ecosystem service distribution (Loos et al. 2023). ...
Organisations working on conservation and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects with communities have sometimes damaged the wellbeing of those communities. The social and political dynamics between organisations funding or implementing projects and the communities in which they work might be a factor causing this damage. This review paper explores the literature for evidence of and methods for evaluating impacts on community wellbeing from social relations in conservation and natural resource management projects. We found 101 papers addressing social connections in the human wellbeing-conservation nexus, acknowledging the damage done by colonising project relations and detailing proposals for or examples of more equitable relationality, and also evaluations of social equity in conservation/CBNRM work. However, we found few explicit evaluations of how the social, economic, and political relations of projects impact the wellbeing of participating communities. We call on researchers to address this gap, especially those working in evaluating project outcomes. To advance this agenda, we present literature that sheds light on what more equitable project relations look like, and how project relationality might be evaluated. We finish with ideas for how organisations can diagnose internal relationality problems likely to affect project outcomes, and how to transform those.
... does an inoculum need to land precisely within the root zone of a target plant to succeed?). Furthermore, reliance on expensive and highly technical approaches could be a liability for restoration practice where patents and corporate control of technology could limit affordable uptake and equitable use of tools needed to improve restoration outcomes (Osborne et al., 2021). A targeted consortium of microbes (e.g. ...
Soil microbiota are important components of healthy ecosystems. Greater consideration of soil microbiota in the restoration of biodiverse, functional, and resilient ecosystems is required to address the twin global crises of biodiversity decline and climate change. In this review, we discuss available and emerging practical applications of soil microbiota into ( i ) restoration planning, ( ii ) direct interventions for shaping soil biodiversity, and ( iii ) strategies for monitoring and predicting restoration trajectories. We show how better planning of restoration activities to account for soil microbiota can help improve progress towards restoration targets. We show how planning to embed soil microbiota experiments into restoration projects will permit a more rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of different restoration methods, especially when complemented by statistical modelling approaches that capitalise on existing data sets to improve causal understandings and prioritise research strategies where appropriate. In addition to recovering belowground microbiota, restoration strategies that include soil microbiota can improve the resilience of whole ecosystems. Fundamentally, restoration planning should identify appropriate reference target ecosystem attributes and – from the perspective of soil microbiota – comprehensibly consider potential physical, chemical and biological influences on recovery. We identify that inoculating ecologically appropriate soil microbiota into degraded environments can support a range of restoration interventions (e.g. targeted, broad‐spectrum and cultured inoculations) with promising results. Such inoculations however are currently underutilised and knowledge gaps persist surrounding successful establishment in light of community dynamics, including priority effects and community coalescence. We show how the ecological trajectories of restoration sites can be assessed by characterising microbial diversity, composition, and functions in the soil. Ultimately, we highlight practical ways to apply the soil microbiota toolbox across the planning, intervention, and monitoring stages of ecosystem restoration and address persistent open questions at each stage. With continued collaborations between researchers and practitioners to address knowledge gaps, these approaches can improve current restoration practices and ecological outcomes.
... What the concept may yet aid is better acknowledging and understanding the importance of including a wider set of values in addition to the economic and ecological value dimensions in environmental governance. Approaching objects in nature as having "socio-ecological" value, allow the description and recognition of the relational value between nature and society, such as the ritual, symbolic, relational, or emotional properties of nature, as well as the temporal, geographical, and cultural context of these relations (Armitage et al. 2009;Blomley and Walters 2019;Roszko 2021;Sanborn and Jung 2021;Osborne et al. 2021). ...
This article addresses the shortcomings in the governance of the Norwegian macroscopic brown algae Ascophyllum nodosum (rockweed) that appeared when approaching rockweed as a socio-ecologic object in the Vega archipelago on the Norwegian Helgeland coast. A common seaweed along the Norwegian coast, rockweed constitutes an important species in Norway’s ‘blue forests’. Historically, rockweed harvesting was an important source of income for the local coastal population in Norway. Although not comparable to the newer and expanding kelp industry, rockweed harvesting is still profitable along the coast. Despite revived attention from the seaweed industry, state management of rockweed in 2024 is conspicuously absent. Combined with the lack of scientific knowledge of the consequences of rockweed harvesting on the local coastal ecosystems, the responsibility for ensuring sustainable harvesting of rockweed lies with the industry itself. On Vega, however, where rockweed is a highly valued and contested coastal species with a high economic, ecologic, and cultural significance, rockweed harvesting was a conflicted issue. In approaching rockweed as a socio-ecologic object from ‘below’, the article identifies hegemonic structures and discourses in Norwegian marine governance, suggesting how a narrow definition of ‘value’ comes to matter—not only for rockweed—but for sustainable governance of all marine and coastal ecosystems. This article is also an important contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on nature’s values, power, and knowledge in environmental management.
... Restoration planners and practitioners must consider structural inequities driven by, for instance, place, gender, race, class, caste, and culture-which determines how local communities interact with the environment and each other-and how power operates through the local social, political, and economic context . Key principles at local, national, and international levels like those outlined by Osborne et al. (2021), or the rules for planning socially sustainable ecosystem restoration by Elias et al. (2021), are crucial for restoration initiatives to create effective, equitable, and transformative landscapes. Learn more about how to apply the methodology to better understand landscape governance in "Mapping Social Landscapes," by Buckingham et al. (2018), which includes mapping actors' resource flows and mapping their priorities and values, and understanding power dynamics in a study area with global examples from Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Rwanda. ...
This guidebook presents a step-by-step process for planning and implementing a landscape approach to restoration projects. It identifies five essential stages - Scope, Design, Finance, Implement, and Monitor - each outlined with key steps and a checklist to help project developers track their progress and plan properly before launching into a new project.
... Devolution of property rights to local communities and tenure reforms have not only helped to reduce deforestation but have also been shown to drive increases in forest cover and human wellbeing of forest dependent communities (Benzeev et al., 2023, Baragwanath et al., 2023, Oldekop et al., 2019. In contrast, restoration efforts that fail to consider community rights and tenure could lead to social injustice and have negative impacts on community livelihoods (Osborne et al., 2021). National policy frameworks are one of the key mechanisms through which community rights can be integrated into FLR activities and interventions. ...
Secure rights and tenure are considered essential components for socially just forest landscape restoration (FLR). Through a content analysis of India's forest policies, we identify enabling factors and challenges for rights based FLR. We discuss the practical implications of these enabling factors and barriers for FLR in India using evidence from the literature. We find that policies like the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and the Panchayat Extension of Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act support rights based FLR by providing communities with secure forest management rights and ownership of forest products. However, other policies, such as the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, can act antagonistically and weaken community rights in FLR. From our analysis, we draw three key lessons for rights based FLR in India and globally. First, there is a need to identify and resolve conflicts among forest policies that undermine rights and affect community participation in FLR. Second, policies must go beyond providing a potential for claiming rights and make claiming rights actionable in practice. Third, there is a need for a greater focus on promoting FLR mechanisms that allow communities to participate in FLR decision-making with their full set of recognised rights, including in the design of FLR activities that align with community preferences and needs.
... These include the nature restoration law proposal and the proposal for introducing new environmental-economic accounts modules (COM/2022/329). Moreover, this proposed model can support activities derived from these standards to accomplish several useful tasks, including promoting value-based restoration, aligning policies and financial incentives towards ecosystem conservation and restoration, integrating restoration practices with local needs and aspirations, promoting regenerative interventions, and improving collaboration between countries (Osborne et al., 2021). The method of determining ecosystem conditions in this study included information related to forest composition, structure, function, landscape, and abiotic characteristics. ...
We developed an application model based on the System of Environmental Economic Accounting-Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA) framework, endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission in 2021. This model enables mapping condition accounts for forest ecosystems using automated computation. We applied the model nationally in Spain between 2000 and 2015 to test its effectiveness. Our model follows five methodological steps to generate forest condition accounts: (i) definition and spatial delimitation of forest ecosystem types; (ii) selection of variables using the ecosystem condition typology encompassing physical, chemical, compositional, structural, functional, and landscape characteristics; (iii) establishment of reference levels, including lower (collapse) and upper (high ecosystem integrity) thresholds; (iv) aggregation of variables into condition index; and (v) calculation of a single condition index by rescaling the aggregated indicators between 0 and 1. The results obtained from the model provide valuable insights into the status and trends of individual condition indicators, as well as aggregated condition index values for forest ecosystems, in a spatially explicit manner. Overall, the condition of the forest ecosystems in Spain showed a slight increase, from 0.56 in 2000 to 0.58 in 2015. However, distinct trends were observed for each ecosystem type. For example, mixed Alpine and Macaronesia forests exhibited a significant improvement, while the continental Mediterranean coniferous forests did not show any change. This innovative approach to monitoring forest condition accounts has important potential applications in policy and decision-making processes. It can contribute to effective evidence-based nature conservation, ecosystem service management, and identifying restoration areas.
Ecological restoration efforts protect and benefit the biota we value, contribute to clean air and water, and enhance human health and mental well-being. Such efforts, however, are futile unless we concurrently address the climate crisis. Many restoration actions implicitly or explicitly provide climate mitigation outcomes, and these need to be emphasized and prioritized. Local actions that collectively have global impacts need greater participation of academics, managers, policymakers, and stakeholders. Such actions will reduce the current knowing-versus-doing gap, speed up essential activities, and increase the spatial extent of restoration efforts that benefit climate solutions and provide community resilience to extreme climate events. All landscapes, regardless of the extent of human impacts, are potentially eligible for these actions. Priorities of management that are neutral or negative with respect to climate mitigation need to be reevaluated given the need and availability of similar actions that facilitate climate mitigation. If traditional management programs such as urban construction, tillage, landscaping, roads, trails, and weed control are subsumed within an enhanced climate solutions framework, restoration emerges as the common management theme. Of particular importance, programs that both repair and prepare for current and anticipated catastrophic climatic events deserve priority status. A relatively new paradigm created by land managers, the “Restore-Accept-Direct” model, provides a framework where conservation, human well-being, and enhanced climate solution outcomes can be simultaneously achieved.
What does it mean to restore the environment? What is restored, according to whom, and at the expense of what? And when or where does restoration end? Restoration activities often presuppose environmental degradation, and posit a historical state that restoration will re-attain, in turn licensing activities that benefit the relatively powerful rather than the relatively weak. Thus, this article critiques a complex set of interlinked ideas and practices around restoration through reviews of literature in political ecology, urban and environmental studies, and conservation science. It expands upon ideas of restoration and foregrounds an ideology of cure that underlies so much of restoration discourse and practice.
The present paper critically examines water‐assisted developmental projects and their associated conflicts through the lens of political ecology, with a particular focus on hydroelectric power generation in the Global South. These projects often catalyze localized socio‐cultural, political, and ecological tensions, especially in indigenous territories where human–nature relationships have evolved through colonial and postcolonial ecological transformations. Our approach conceptualizes political ecology to explore the multidimensional conflicts tied to such projects, using the Turga Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Project in the Purulia district of West Bengal, India, as a case study. This region exemplifies the socio‐ecological conflicts between state‐led hydroelectric initiatives and the local indigenous communities, providing critical insights into the broader dynamics of water‐based development in the Global South. The five primary areas of inquiry in this paper include (1) the environmental ramifications of the Turga Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Project on Purulia's landscapes, wildlife, and ecosystems; (2) the social consequences that have emerged, including displacement, resource access disparities, and challenges to local livelihoods; (3) the power dynamics that shape the decision‐making processes surrounding the project, shedding light on the role of government policies and corporate interests; (4) comparative analyses with similar hydroelectric projects globally, providing valuable insights into the uniqueness of the Purulia case; and (5) the policy implications and recommendations to ameliorate the conflicts and foster a more sustainable and equitable approach to hydroelectric development. This study highlights the critical role of political ecology in understanding human–nature conflicts and resource management. It emphasizes the need for an integrative approach that considers both technological and socio‐political aspects. The Turga Pumped Storage Project in Purulia offers broader insights into the global challenges of sustainable energy and climate change, underscoring the importance of inclusive and environmentally responsible energy production and resource management.
Vietnam has made many commitments to energy transition, as reflected in legal documents such as the Power Development Plan VIII and National Energy Master Plan for the 2021–2030 Period With a Vision to 2050. However, no studies have evaluated whether energy-transition documents issued by the government sufficiently incorporate the equity elements. To fill in the gap, this chapter examines Vietnam’s existing energy transition policies, with an emphasis on five equity aspects, including distributional justice, recognition justice, procedural justice, economic equity, and power dynamics. It also analyses the main concepts, themes, and current gaps. Out of 615 relevant documents, nine were scrutinized and demonstrated notable similarities and differences in terms of themes, concepts, and equity considerations. The chapter revealed eight recurrent focuses across all documents, including energy transition institutional frameworks and policies; climate resilience and green opportunities; human resource development; science and technology improvement; regional prosperity and inclusivity; social safety nets and well-being; communication, awareness, and community engagement; and economic diversification and revitalization. The emphasis on equity dimensions was limited in all publications. Further efforts are imperative to ensure the policy framework reflects a commitment to support the affected communities and enhance public engagement in the energy transition process. While improvements on institutional policies and technical solutions have been addressed more comprehensively in the Vietnamese legal documents, more attention should be brought to the socio-economic burdens affecting certain communities. Connecting social priorities with energy transition is crucial to create effective policies and prompt actions that benefit different social groups.
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 self-governance. We highlight the embeddedness of the current international landscape restoration efforts within the (neo)colonial and neoliberal natural protection efforts, risking similar injustices, violence and forms of oppression, including epistemic and political denial and oppression, ignorance and/or erasure of local people's histories, agency, their sense of belonging and ways of knowing, as well as weakening of their rights and access over their territories and livelihoods. Some of the major barriers to effective, just and equitable landscape restoration include: (i) prioritization of global over local knowledge systems, logics and politics in global landscape restoration; (ii) targeting of small-scale drivers of land degradation over large-scale and more profitable ones; (iii) offshoring burdens of global landscape restoration on the local people's shoulders; and (iv) reliance on state authority and institutional structures and bypassing of customary and indigenous authorities and legal systems. We conclude by proposing a set of questions and conditions for policy makers and scholars to contemplate and reflect upon when designing and analysing landscape restoration projects and activities.
Many countries globally have committed to restoring forested landscapes on a large scale.Yet, there is limited understanding of why people engage with restoration programs and theassociated social impacts, hindering efforts to scale restoration. This study examines thedrivers for landholder engagement in farmland restoration in Brazil's Pontal doParanapanema region of the Atlantic Forest. Using mixed methods, including surveys, semistructuredand key informant interviews, we find that compatibility with immediate needs isstrongly associated with engagement among smallholders. Compliance with environmentallegislation is associated with large landholders’ engagement in restoration. Furthermore, landtenure insecurity for smallholders and changes in rules over time for large landholders couldrestrict long-term engagement. Formalizing land tenure and developing mechanisms thatsupport smallholder engagement could increase restoration uptake, while the stability ofexisting environmental policy might encourage large landholder engagement.
National reforestation initiatives with ambitious targets and multiple objectives are becoming the norm across the Global South. The extent to which these large-scale initiatives are actually achieving their multiple and potentially conflicting objectives, however, is largely unknown. Sembrando Vida, a national initiative in Mexico implemented in 2019, pays smallholder farmers to plant agroforests in order to reduce poverty and forest loss, and protect biodiversity. We assessed to what degree program recruitment met its stated objectives via its selection of participating municipalities and households. Because program data are not publicly available, we consolidated and harmonized >14 million policy payments (totaling ∼$4 billion USD) to smallholder farmers, thus creating the first spatiotemporal dataset of program outcomes. We found that ∼450k rural households in ∼1000 municipalities across the country participated in the program consistently from 2019 to 2022. The program was reasonably well targeted to achieve its poverty reduction objectives. Significantly more households (ANOVA, p < 0.001) were enrolled in high-poverty (10.4%) than low-poverty (4.9%) municipalities, despite more money being transferred in absolute terms to low-poverty municipalities. The program did not reach some regions that best fit its three goals. Using a zero-inflated negative binomial model, we showed that the distribution of participating households was more likely to address poverty (coefficient = 0.51, p < 0.001 at household level) and forest cover loss (0.1, p = 0.01) than to restore areas important for biodiversity (−0.08, p = 0.02). Finally, we conducted a spatial analysis showing that there is technically sufficient rural land (4.29 Mha) and households (491k) to maximize the potential of all policy objectives simultaneously, but this would require that the program operate in only 83 municipalities across 10 states. Our results highlight the challenges in reaching high poverty regions while meeting multiple other objectives when scaling up forest landscape restoration.
Ecosystem restoration is a necessity for addressing socio‐ecological challenges by improving ecosystem resilience and alleviating poverty through local community involvement. Here, we review a community‐based, large‐scale ecosystem restoration program, Working for Ecosystems, implemented by eThekwini Municipality in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, between 2007 and 2022. For this study, we interrogated monthly and annual reports generated by the program between 2011 and 2021 to describe how the program worked to suppress invasive alien plants (IAPs) and provided employment opportunities to marginalized groups (women, youth, military veterans, and people living with disabilities). Annual budget was positively correlated with the area cleared of IAPs and effort (person‐days in the field). The program successfully incorporated marginalized groups, but military veterans and people living with disabilities remained in smaller numbers and were not well quantified. Participants were encouraged to constitute companies—Small, Medium, and Micro Enterprises—that were then subcontracted to the program or could progress to other endeavors, allowing other community members to enter the program. A steady increase in the implementation budget emphasized the need for a long‐term plan to ensure accountability and sustainability of restoration and socio‐ecological systems.
Integrated Landscape Management Policy for achieving SDGs
Currently, climate change at the international level has raised a number of questions about the link between people and nature, but it is a topic that does not motivate all young people in universities. EcoSquirriz is an interactive robot that will be deployed within the green areas or courtyards of universities to raise awareness among students about the environment and provide information about simple actions to be more responsible with the environment.
Elevating levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels, combustion of organic matter, and unsustainable land practices, have amplified global concerns regarding climate change. The industrial revolution has propelled the rise in CO2 emissions, leading to anticipated increases in concentrations and alterations in CO2 sequestration within agricultural soils. Land use alterations, encompassing deforestation, biomass burning, changes in agricultural conditions, drainage of natural wetlands, and incorrect soil management practices, have further amplified these emissions. Moreover, the reduction of soil organic carbon (SOC), an outcome of soil degradation and mismanagement, has intensified atmospheric CO2 levels. However, by implementing state-of-the-art land application and contemporary management systems in agriculture, there’s potential to slow the rate of CO2 emissions. The restoration of depleted SOC is possible through various strategies, such as converting marginal lands into restorative uses, promoting reduced or zero-tillage practices combined with cover or residue crops, and implementing nutrient cycling via composting, manure application, and other sustainable soil and water management techniques. Long-term soil carbon sequestration is increasingly being viewed as a comprehensive strategy to combat climate change. By rejuvenating depleted soils, enhancing biomass production, purifying surface and groundwater, and offsetting CO2 emissions from fossil
fuels, soil carbon sequestration can serve as a holistic and effective approach for mitigating current climatic changes. Adoption of these innovative techniques is crucial in managing the challenges imposed by recent environmental changes, positioning soil carbon sequestration as a promising solution. This review aims to
explore the potential methods of mitigating climate change through the implementation of soil carbon sequestration strategies
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, NY, 2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 6 Sept. 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197683958.003.0004, accessed 24 Sept. 2024.
ABSRACT 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 self-governance. We highlight the embeddedness of the current international landscape restoration efforts within the (neo)colonial and neoliberal natural protection efforts, risking similar injustices, violence and forms of oppression, including epistemic and political denial and oppression, ignorance and/or erasure of local people's histories, agency, their sense of belonging and ways of knowing, as well as weakening of their rights and access over their territories and livelihoods. Some of the major barriers to effective, just and equitable landscape restoration include: (i) prioritization of global over local knowledge systems, logics and politics in global landscape restoration; (ii) targeting of small-scale drivers of land degradation over large-scale and more profitable ones; (iii) offshoring burdens of global landscape restoration on the local people's shoulders; and (iv) reliance on state authority and institutional structures and bypassing of customary and indigenous authorities and legal systems. We conclude by proposing a set of questions and conditions for policy makers and scholars to contemplate and reflect upon when designing and analysing landscape restoration projects and activities.
Public lands including forests and community pastures are still crucial means of local livelihood, social security, and environmental conservation in many developing countries including Nepal. However, these resources are increasingly managed primarily to offset the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries. The new management has exacerbated many local problems: livelihood con- striction, social crises, human casualties (deaths and serious injuries), biodiversity degradation, and water scarcity including cryosphere retreating. Drawing data from multiple sources, this study attempted to explain the international political objectives and processes that dispossessed developing societies of public land resources for the benefit of developed countries. It shows that representatives of the developed countries were proactively and strategically involved in agenda formation, solutions negotiations, and decision-making while developing international environmental policies, and succeeded to structure the policies for managing the resources of developing countries for the best benefit of their own countries. The developed countries provided funds and experts, as strategic tools, through international aid agencies to implement the policies of their interest in institutionally weak countries. In Nepal, the aid agencies influenced the thinking of the public and the decisions of the government and other stakeholders through a series of strategic measures. They propagandized false crises, worked with a coalition of powerful international agencies, offered free technical support, and changed national policies proactively to manage the land resources for achieving their missions. Active involvement in policy implementation also helped the agencies to monitor implementation hurdles and apply other tactics to resolve them. Lucrative flash incentives were provided to motivate and get the support of communities, powerful stakeholders, and politicians to implement the policies. Psychosocial pressures were also applied to persuade local communities and their leaders for getting local cooperation in making and practicing new legal institutions (government authority rules or orders, user group rules, and forest management plans) that bind and control local communities for forest protection. The institutions obliged local communities to contribute free labor or cash for developing, modifying, and protecting the forests. These two levels of interventions led to the further development of reinforcing institutions, resource conditions, and social-ecological systems that secured benefits for developed countries and deprived local communities of power to control, produce and access the public land resources in their own backyard for years. This study also showed that international environmental policies and aid agencies have respectively served as institutional weapons and vehicles for materially and institutionally ally powerful countries to colonize the land resources of weaker countries, without using of physical coercion or deployment of military forces.
Corporate reporting must embrace holistic, scientific principles.
The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) frames restoration as a momentous nature-based solution for achieving many of the ecological, economic, and social objectives outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, a critical void lies at the heart of this agenda: The lack of attention to social and political dimensions of nature and restoration initiatives. At this critical juncture, urgent attention is needed to the power and politics that shape the values, meanings, and science driving restoration; and to the uneven experiences of these processes as national restoration pledges touch down in diverse and unequal contexts. In this introduction to the special issue on "Restoration for Whom, by Whom?", we critically examine the social inclusivity of restoration agendas, policies, and practices as these unfold across ecological and geographic scales. We argue that feminist political ecology (FPE), with its focus on gendered power relations, scale integration, and historical awareness, and its critique of the commodification of nature, offers a valuable lens through which to examine the socio-political and economic dynamics of restoration. Taking an FPE perspective, we elucidate how the ten papers comprising the special issue challenge mainstream narratives of environmental sustainability and suggest more grounded and nuanced ways forward for inclusive restoration initiatives. In conclusion, we highlight the urgency of addressing the systemic fault lines that create exclusions in restoration policies and practice; and the need to legitimize the plural voices, values, situated knowledges, and paths to sustainably transform degraded landscapes.
Governments and conservation organisations often point to a large gap between existing financial resources and the resources needed to achieve biodiversity objectives. But the gap is almost always presented without context, as though biodiversity loss will be resolved through increased funding alone. To illuminate crucial pathways for transformative change, this report examines the political and economic dimensions of biodiversity loss. “Beyond the gap: placing biodiversity finance in the global economy” addresses two questions: how does the organization of the global economy drive biodiversity loss, and how has existing biodiversity finance performed? Trade, investment and financial regulation (or lack thereof), global economic pressures that push biodiverse countries into debt, and inequality across racialized, gender, class and colonial lines, all drive biodiversity loss and require urgent attention. Instead of transformation, a series of voluntary measures and market-based mechanisms such as payments for ecosystem services or blended finance schemes have been presented as tools to span the resource gap. This report shows that these efforts are marginal at best, and, at worst, entrench the power of rich world governments and non-state institutions like banks, large international NGOs, and supranationals. It is apparent that we must move “beyond the gap”. Only by placing biodiversity loss in the global economy will it be possible to realize transformative, inclusive and equitable change. The authors offer concrete recommendations for negotiators, civil society organizations, and activist groups to push questions of biodiversity finance beyond the gap.
Urgent solutions to global climate change are needed. Ambitious tree‐planting initiatives, many already underway, aim to sequester enormous quantities of carbon to partly compensate for anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which are a major cause of rising global temperatures. However, tree planting that is poorly planned and executed could actually increase CO2 emissions and have long‐term, deleterious impacts on biodiversity, landscapes and livelihoods. Here, we highlight the main environmental risks of large‐scale tree planting and propose 10 golden rules, based on some of the most recent ecological research, to implement forest ecosystem restoration that maximizes rates of both carbon sequestration and biodiversity recovery while improving livelihoods. These are as follows: (1) Protect existing forest first; (2) Work together (involving all stakeholders); (3) Aim to maximize biodiversity recovery to meet multiple goals; (4) Select appropriate areas for restoration; (5) Use natural regeneration wherever possible; (6) Select species to maximize biodiversity; (7) Use resilient plant material (with appropriate genetic variability and provenance); (8) Plan ahead for infrastructure, capacity and seed supply; (9) Learn by doing (using an adaptive management approach); and (10) Make it pay (ensuring the economic sustainability of the project). We focus on the design of long‐term strategies to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises and support livelihood needs. We emphasize the role of local communities as sources of indigenous knowledge, and the benefits they could derive from successful reforestation that restores ecosystem functioning and delivers a diverse range of forest products and services. While there is no simple and universal recipe for forest restoration, it is crucial to build upon the currently growing public and private interest in this topic, to ensure interventions provide effective, long‐term carbon sinks and maximize benefits for biodiversity and people.
Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) is considered worldwide as a powerful approach to recover ecological functionality and to improve human well-being in degraded and deforested landscapes. The literature produced by FLR programs could be a valuable tool to understand how they align with the existing principles of FLR. We conducted a systematic qualitative review to identify the main FLR concepts and definitions adopted in the literature from 1980 to 2017 and the underlying actions commonly suggested to enable FLR implementation. We identified three domains and 12 main associated principles—(i) Project management and governance domain contains five principles: (a) Landscape scale, (b) Prioritization, (c) Legal and normative compliance, (d) Participation, (e) Adaptive management; (ii) Human aspect domain with four principles: (a) Enhance livelihoods, (b) Inclusiveness and equity, (c) Economic diversification, (d) Capacity building; (iii) Ecological Aspects domain with three principles: (a) Biodiversity conservation, (b) Landscape heterogeneity and connectivity, (c) Provision of ecosystem goods and services. Our results showcase variations in FLR principles and how they are linked with practice, especially regarding the lack of social aspects in FLR projects. Finally, we provide a starting point for future tools aiming to improve guidance frameworks for FLR.
Decades of research and policy interventions on biodiversity have insufficiently addressed the dual issues of biodiversity degradation and social justice. New approaches are therefore needed. We devised a research and action agenda that calls for a collective task of revisiting biodiversity toward the goal of sustaining diverse and just futures for life on Earth. Revisiting biodiversity involves critically reflecting on past and present research, policy, and practice concerning biodiversity to inspire creative thinking about the future. The agenda was developed through a 2‐year dialogue process that involved close to 300 experts from diverse disciplines and locations. This process was informed by social science insights that show biodiversity research and action is underpinned by choices about how problems are conceptualized. Recognizing knowledge, action, and ethics as inseparable, we synthesized a set of principles that help navigate the task of revisiting biodiversity. The agenda articulates 4 thematic areas for future research. First, researchers need to revisit biodiversity narratives by challenging conceptualizations that exclude diversity and entrench the separation of humans, cultures, economies, and societies from nature. Second, researchers should focus on the relationships between the Anthropocene, biodiversity, and culture by considering humanity and biodiversity as tied together in specific contexts. Third, researchers should focus on nature and economies by better accounting for the interacting structures of economic and financial systems as core drivers of biodiversity loss. Finally, researchers should enable transformative biodiversity research and action by reconfiguring relationships between human and nonhuman communities in and through science, policy, and practice. Revisiting biodiversity necessitates a renewed focus on dialogue among biodiversity communities and beyond that critically reflects on the past to channel research and action toward fostering just and diverse futures for human and nonhuman life on Earth.
The United Nations (UN) recently declared 2021 to 2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Against this background, we review recent social-ecological systems research and summarize key themes that could help to improve ecosystem restoration in dynamic social contexts. The themes relate to resilience and adaptability, ecosystem stewardship and navigation of change, relational values, the coevolution of human and ecological systems, long-range social-ecological connections, and leverage points for transformation. We recommend two cross-cutting new research foci; namely: (i) post hoc cross-sectional assessments of social-ecological restoration projects; and (ii) transdisciplinary social-ecological 'living labs' that accompany new restoration projects as they unfold. With global agendas increasingly taking a social-ecological perspective, the recasting of ecosystem restoration as a social-ecological endeavor offers exciting new opportunities for both research and practice.
Ecologically unequal exchange theory posits asymmetric net flows of biophysical resources from poorer to richer countries. To date, empirical evidence to support this theoretical notion as a systemic aspect of the global economy is largely lacking. Through environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output modelling, we provide empirical evidence for ecologically unequal exchange as a persistent feature of the global economy from 1990 to 2015. We identify the regions of origin and final consumption for four resource groups: materials, energy, land, and labor. By comparing the monetary exchange value of resources embodied in trade, we find significant international disparities in how resource provision is compensated. Value added per ton of raw material embodied in exports is 11 times higher in high-income countries than in those with the lowest income, and 28 times higher per unit of embodied labor. With the exception of embodied land for China and India, all other world regions serve as net exporters of all types of embodied resources to high-income countries across the 1990-2015 time period. On aggregate, ecologically unequal exchange allows high-income countries to simultaneously appropriate resources and to generate a monetary surplus through international trade. This has far-reaching implications for global sustainability and for the economic growth prospects of nations.
Forest restoration occupies centre stage in global conversations about carbon removal and biodiversity conservation, but recent research rarely acknowledges social dimensions or environmental justice implications related to its implementation. We find that 294.5 million people live on tropical forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South, including 12% of the total population in low-income countries. Forest landscape restoration that prioritizes local communities by affording them rights to manage and restore forests provides a promising option to align global agendas for climate mitigation, conservation, environmental justice and sustainable development. An analysis of the overlap between tropical forest restoration, human populations, development and national policies for community forest ownership shows that 294.5 million people live within forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South.
Looking ahead to the United Nations’ 2021-2030 Decade of Ecosystems Restoration, we would like to ponder and discuss two fundamental goals to improve, mainstream, and scale up ecological restoration. The first is to cultivate alternative visions of the human dimension in relation to ecological restoration and other restorative activities. The second is to develop shared protocols for planning, revamping and monitoring the progress of social goals related to ecological restoration within the social construction theoretical framework, based on three interrelated dimensions: stakeholder-based problem definition, social representations, and legitimation. We draw on ongoing work in Caquetá (Colombian Amazonia) to consider how these dimensions may be incorporated into tangible restoration practices. Caquetá is facing the highest deforestation rates in the Amazonian region due to a highly volatile sociopolitical context and recent armed conflicts that have claimed thousands of victims to date. We conclude that the work in Caquetá demonstrates a process of social construction that effectively couples new human values with ecological restoration. Our work also provides evidence that the human dimension of restoration is a central issue in the restoration of human, social and ecosystem health and must be integrated into the framework of the coming Decade of Ecosystems Restoration.
Ecological restoration, when implemented effectively and sustainably, contributes to protecting biodiversity; improving human health and wellbeing; increasing food and water security; delivering goods, services, and economic prosperity; and supporting climate change mitigation, resilience, and adaptation. It is a solutions-based approach that engages communities, scientists, policymakers, and land managers to repair ecological damage and rebuild a healthier relationship between people and the rest of nature. When combined with conservation and sustainable use, ecological restoration is the link needed to move local, regional, and global environmental conditions from a state of continued degradation, to one of net positive improvement. The second edition of the International Principles and Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration (the Standards) presents a robust framework for restoration projects to achieve intended goals, while addressing challenges including effective design and implementation, accounting for complex ecosystem dynamics (especially in the context of climate change), and navigating trade-offs associated with land management priorities and decisions.
When we speak of long-term community resource management, it is necessary to qualify our terms. How is the community enacting resource management defined? How are communities practicing collective resource management relate to others in the commons, such as international development organizations and states? How do community practices shift in and out of focus as resource management strategies change over time? The chapter addresses these thematic questions through a series of case studies spanning continents and centuries. To understand participation in community resource management projects, we describe women-focused mangrove reforestation program in Madagascar alongside the management of bison-kin by the Salish and Kootenai on the National Bison Range in the USA. These cases extend the community into relations with state and non-state actors. Such dimension becomes the center of attention in examples from forest conservation in the Congo Basin and step-well water management in colonial India. The practices valued as community resource management today were not always thought well of and may be dismissed in the future. Changing public attitudes toward swidden agriculture is a case in point. Through the temporality of swidden, we conclude that changing attitudes reflect the confrontation between local and metropolitan visions of proper relations between society and environment. What is asked of community resource management is to determine these relationships through the promotion of specific practices, we are mindful who participates in decision-making and what is asked in every encounter.
Despite substantial increases in the scope and magnitude of biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration, there remains ongoing degradation of natural resources that adversely affects both biodiversity and human well-being. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can be an effective framework for reversing this trend, by increasing the alignment between conservation and sustainable development objectives. However, unless there is clarity on its evolution, definition and principles, and relationship with related approaches, it will not be possible to develop evidence-based standards and guidelines, or to implement, assess, improve and upscale NbS interventions globally. In order to address this gap, we present the definition and principles underpinning the NbS framework, recently adopted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and compare it to (1) the Ecosystem Approach that was the foundation for developing the NbS definitional framework, and (2) four specific ecosystem based approaches (Forest Landscape Restoration, Ecosystem-based Adaptation, Ecological Restoration and Protected Areas) that can be considered as falling under the NbS framework. Although we found substantial alignment between NbS principles and the principles of the other frameworks, three of the eight NbS principles stand out from other approaches: NbS can be implemented alone or in an integrated manner with other solutions ; NbS should be applied at a landscape scale; and, NbS are integral to the overall design of policies, measures and actions, to address societal challenges. Reversely, concepts such as adaptive management/governance, effectiveness , uncertainty, multi-stakeholder participation, and temporal scale are present in other frameworks but not captured at all or detailed enough in the NbS principles. This critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the NbS principles can inform the review and revision of principles supporting specific types of NbS (such as the approaches reviewed here), as well as serve as the foundation for the development of standards for the successful implementation of NbS.
The Bonn Challenge, a voluntary global initiative launched in 2011, aims to bring up to 350 million hectares of degraded land into some level of restorative state by 2030. Pilot forest landscape restoration (FLR) efforts indicate that enhancing community and smallholder tenure rights is critical for achieving FLR's desired joint environmental and social well-being objectives. The Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM) is a decision support tool that has become widely used in national and subnational FLR planning. Although ROAM is structured so as to encourage inclusion of tenure rights and governance analyses, the extent to which ROAM reports actually incorporate tenure issues is undocumented. To address this gap, we report the results of an analysis of the currently publicly accessible ROAM reports from eight countries in Africa and Latin America. We found that the ROAM reports superficially covered tenure and governance considerations. We recommend design elements for a tenure diagnostic that should facilitate more robust tenure and land gov-ernance analyses-to complement ROAM and other FLR planning approaches. We suggest the adoption of a rights-enhanced FLR approach so as to capitalize on the motivating force that strong and secure tenure rights provide for landholders to engage in forest restoration design and practice. Although developed in the context of FLR, the proposed tenure diagnostic should have broad utility for other land use initiatives where tenure rights and security are at stake.
The 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate reinforces actions to conserve and enhance forests as carbon reservoirs. A decade after sub-national demonstration projects to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) commenced, we examine why many REDD+ schemes appear to have fuelled social conflict while having limited success in addressing the drivers of forest loss and degradation. Our analysis is two-tiered: first we synthesise findings from a set of ethnographic case studies of REDD+ in Mainland Southeast Asia, conducted by the authors; second, we explore whether the insights from our regional synthesis apply globally, through a comparative review of published qualitative research on REDD+ field experiences. Our results reveal three major
implementation dynamics that can undermine REDD+ in practice, which we conceptualise from science and technology studies and critical political ecology as follows: 1) problems with the enrolment of governments, civil society, and local forest users in REDD+ governance; 2) the prevalence of overly simplified codification systems for REDD+ implementation that mismatch targeted societies and landscapes; and 3) the consequent dissonance between REDD+ objectives and outcomes. Together, these problematic dynamics reveal how and why REDD+ so often misses its targets of reducing deforestation and delivering community benefits. In effect, it appears that REDD+ in the course of implementation maps onto local power structures and political economies, rendering it blunt as tool for change. The potential of REDD+ as a ‘solution’ in the global climate regime must therefore be scrutinized, along with other similar mechanisms espoused by the green economy.
Mapping global deforestation patterns
Forest loss is being driven by various factors, including commodity production, forestry, agriculture, wildfire, and urbanization. Curtis et al. used high-resolution Google Earth imagery to map and classify global forest loss since 2001. Just over a quarter of global forest loss is due to deforestation through permanent land use change for the production of commodities, including beef, soy, palm oil, and wood fiber. Despite regional differences and efforts by governments, conservationists, and corporations to stem the losses, the overall rate of commodity-driven deforestation has not declined since 2001.
Science , this issue p. 1108
This article examines different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice. Settler ontologies of land operate by occluding other modes of perceiving, representing, and experiencing land. Indigenous ontologies of land are commonly oriented around relationality and reciprocal obligations among humans and the other-than-human. Drawing together scholarship from literatures in political economy, political ecology, Indigenous studies, and post-humanism, we synthesize an approach to thinking with land to understand structures of dispossession and the possibilities for Indigenous revitalization through ontological hybridity. Using two different case studies—plantation development in Indonesia and land revitalization in the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation—we further develop how settler and Indigenous ontologies operate on the ground, illuminating the coexistence of multiple ontologies of land. Given the centrality of land in settler colonialism, hybrid ontologies are important to Indigenous movements seeking to simultaneously strengthen sovereignty over territory and revitalize land-based practices.
Numerous inter-governmental conservation initiatives have failed to halt the loss and degradation of forests. This paper explores the role of policy processes in developing and delivering desired future forest outcomes that meet both global environmental goals and the needs of local forest users. There is a clear disconnect between global commitments and local interventions to achieve forest outcomes. There is an incoherence in forest policy development at different spatial scales. Future forest governance needs to recognise the diversity of actors in the policy process and the complexity of local forest contexts. New actors in the policy process will include knowledge brokers and policy entrepreneurs who increasingly shape the policy discourse. There is also a need for policy durability and problem focused policy-learning pathways. Forest and allied sciences continue to be critical for delivering desired forest outcomes, and learning from the diversity of local contexts is critical to creating effective and coherent policies.
Political ecology is a powerful framework for analyzing the underlying causes of environmental change, yet underutilized for guiding an ethical response to the Anthropocene. In this article, I introduce Public Political Ecology as an approach for practicing engaged scholarship in this moment of ecological crisis. A political, ethical and educational project, public political ecology is influenced by Antonio Gramsci's work on the philosophy of praxis. It therefore operates from the understanding that ideas are a material force capable of transforming society in revolutionary ways, and through a community of praxis within which academics can play important roles by engaging more actively with broader publics. Innovations from public geographies such as participatory action research and mapping, service learning, and social media offer important methodologies and tools for this approach. Public political ecology, then, is a means by which political ecologists can serve as earth stewards and thus finally make good on the field's emancipatory claims. Keywords: Political ecology, engaged scholarship, earth stewardship, public geography, praxis
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This paper offers a critical assessment of REDD+ in Nigeria through a political ecology perspective. Focusing on questions of property rights and resource access, it maps the discursive articulations and contestations through which carbon rights are being determined. It also shows how these articulations and contestations are linked to land and forest rights, and how they shape everyday access to the forest. Evidence from the Nigerian case suggests that factors that complicate rights and undermine access to resources for forest communities under REDD+ are immanent to the contested terrain constituted in part by REDD+ proposals, proponents’ discourses and practices geared towards securing the forest for REDD+. Efforts to secure property rights and guarantee the permanence of REDD+ forests align with economic, ecological and ideological aspirations of state and non-state actors to produce a regime of militarised protectionism. I demonstrate how, in addition to its material and symbolic facilitation of the emergent carbon forestry economy, militarised protectionism as a regime of exclusion also constitutes collateral political economies of ‘more-than-carbon’ forest resources (such as timber and non-timber forest products) which perpetuate capital accumulation by the elites. It is this kind of exclusion–accumulation dialectic, legitimised by carbon forestry claims that this paper describes as carbonised exclusion. The paper thus furthers debates on the political ecology of REDD+ and other carbon forestry projects, while productively engaging technocentric literature on REDD+ and property rights.
Ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly used as the driver for conservation and development actions, largely following from the influential Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report of 2005. Scholars skeptical of the neoliberal turn in conservation have critiqued the use of economic values for nature’s services. What has been less well understood and reviewed, however, is how ES are made real by technologies of calculation, and how calculative practices move through networks and among stakeholders. This review traces how definitions and metrics of ecosystem services have evolved and how they are used, including mathematical equations, remote sensing, and modelling software. Using the idea of the creation and deployment of calculative mechanisms, this article discusses how these processes happen in different ecosystem services contexts to assess what work has to happen ontologically to make ecosystem services real and circulatable, and what the opportunities for alternative future pathways are.
Forested landscapes play a critical role in mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon while at the same time fostering adaption by supporting ecosystem services, the recognition of which is reflected in the recent Paris Agreement on climate change. It has been suggested, therefore, that the conservation of forested landscapes may provide a potential win-win in the fight against global environmental change. Despite the potential synergies between mitigation and adaptation efforts, recent studies have also raised concerns about possible trade-offs. Our research employs the analytic lens of social-ecological resilience to explore the intersection between mitigation and adaptation in the context of a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) project in Lao PDR. Drawing on ecosystem analyses, group discussions and interviews with policy makers, practitioners and resource dependent communities, we identify three potential limitations of REDD for achieving climate synergies. First, by disrupting existing disturbance regimes, REDD interventions run the risk of reducing diversity and structural heterogeneity and thus may undermine functional redundancy core to resilience. Second, REDD-as-practiced has tended to select local, rather than structural, drivers of deforestation, focusing disproportionately on curtailing local livelihood practices, reducing local resources for adaptation. Third, REDD risks redirecting ecosystem service benefits away from local communities toward state agencies, incentivizing recentralization and limiting the scope of local governance. We argue that REDD’s potential for delivering synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation in Laos is currently attenuated by structural factors rooted in development policies and broader political-economic trajectories in ways that may not be legible to, or adequately addressed by, current programmes and policy.
An overview of the restoration movement is presented, extending from its origins in forestry in the late 1990s to the landmark Bonn Challenge Ministerial Roundtable in 2011, highlighting the need to transform political commitment into action on the ground. Forest protection and the sustainable management of working forests were the primary issues that dominated the international forest agenda and shaped national policy and action in the late 1990s. The broad use of landscape planning Tools in developing countries during the 1990s started to introduce a broader landscape perspective to sectoral planning processes. The Bonn Challenge aspires to have 150 million Ha of land under restoration by 2020 and is an implementation vehicle for existing international commitments.
Forest recovery is central for addressing major sustainability challenges, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. While positive assessments prevail over the global ecological forest restoration potential, critical research highlights limited potentials and even detrimental local impacts, particularly in the Global South. Here, we argue that knowledge integration across land system science (LSS) and political ecology (PE) can contribute to addressing this contradiction and advance knowledge about ecologically sustainable and socially just forest recovery. We identify five key areas where knowledge integration is promising: (1) developing multidimensional forest definitions, (2) linking forest land to users and interests, (3) identifying reforestation failures and successes, (4) associating drivers and impacts across places and scales, and (5) including justice dimensions in assessments of socio-ecological forest recovery potentials. For each knowledge area, we review key contributions by LSS and PE, and outline future research directions to address ecologically sustainable and socially just forest recovery.
The uneven effects of the climate crisis and the need for decarbonization by reducing fossil fuel exploitation and eliminating subsidies create critical trade-offs and tensions for low-income developing countries. Recent reform of fuel consumption subsidies has shown a perennial mitigation bias largely imposed by external forces, in particular multilateral agencies and foreign governments in the context of the Paris accord. Contradictorily, external pressures to reduce subsidies have created competitive markets for multinationals to have a disproportionate role in supplying energy products which foreground the inequities in Haitian society that have spurred social and political resistance. Empirical work on energy-subsidy reform and climate policy do not sufficiently interrogate the interplay and implications of underlying assumptions, power imbalances between domestic and foreign actors, the challenging infrastructural and political context of renewable energy promotion, and immediate concerns to address worsening social conditions and development priorities. Drawing upon these policy debates, this paper considers the recent experience of Haiti to reform its energy subsidies required by the International Monetary Fund to enforce austerity. The paper takes a more integrated and critical approach to these policy discussions in a context of interconnecting political and socio-ecological crises and climate policy in Haiti. By inductively analyzing Haiti's main climate and energy policies and evidence drawn from field experience, the paper offers a more nuanced understanding of decarbonization and energy debates in this extremely vulnerable context. This approach gives priority to a more dynamic historical analysis of the socio-political context and factors that seek to advance climate justice.
SDG 10 calls for reducing inequalities within and among countries. This chapter evaluates the potential effects of addressing SDG 10 from an environmental justice perspective, which comprises three interrelated dimensions: representative, recognition and distributive justice. We find considerable synergies and complementarities between the SDG 10 targets and goals of environmental justice. However, the disjuncture between SDG 10 and environmental goals within the SDGs may undermine efforts to promote environmental justice. Trade is not included in SDG 10; this is an important gap as markets for forest products can drive forest resource extraction, exacerbating inequalities among actors within global production networks. If SDG 10 addresses structural inequalities, it is also likely to support distributive, representational and recognition justice for forest-dependent populations. However, the myopic translation of its aspirational targets into easily measurable indicators may dampen the potential effects of addressing SDG10 in advancing environmental justice. Addressing ‘migration’ related targets and indicators is likely to elevate the importance of these issues in forestry policy and research, while also prompting a re-thinking of some of the underlying assumptions informing existing research in forestry.
Scholars, planners and practitioners worldwide are increasingly recognising that landscape governance is a promising approach for restoring forested landscapes and simultaneously achieving ecological, economic and social objectives. Because of its integrative nature, landscape governance involves actors who restore landscapes while operating in different economic and policy sectors and at various scales. Consequently, the governance of landscape restoration is typically associated with multi-stakeholder dialogue and negotiation on the different types and forms of restoration, and what these mean in terms of necessary trade-offs. In this article we consider landscape governance to be an indispensable element of landscape restoration that deserves specific attention in the restoration debate. Despite the growing body of literature on the challenges faced in landscape restoration, literature on the role of landscape governance in overcoming these challenges is scarce. Scholars often refer to the importance of the capabilities of the landscape actors involved, but without specifying the capabilities required, which actors require them and why. This article aims to fill this knowledge gap by analysing landscape restoration from a governance perspective, focusing on the key challenges faced by landscape governance and the key capabilities required by landscape actors to overcome them. To define landscape governance capabilities, and to identify their dimensions and categorisations, we consult the literature on landscape governance and on capability. We complement this literature review with our empirical data on the landscape governance capabilities as perceived by landscape professionals engaged in landscape restoration projects and programmes. Based on both, we develop an analytical framework that specifies some of the typical capabilities required for addressing the challenges faced by landscape governance aiming to achieve well-balanced and long-lasting landscape restoration legitimately. The framework not only helps fill a knowledge gap but can also be used to structure the debate on landscape restoration by elucidating landscape governance in various contexts.
Extensive tree planting is widely promoted for reducing atmospheric CO2. In Africa, 1 million km2, mostly of grassy biomes, have been targeted for 'restoration' by 2030. The target is based on the erroneous assumption that these biomes are deforested and degraded. We discuss the pros and cons of exporting fossil fuel emission problems to Africa.
An urgent need to replenish tree canopy cover calls for holistic approaches
Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) are affected by global environmental change because they directly rely on their immediate environment for meeting basic livelihood needs. Therefore, safeguarding and restoring ecosystem resilience is critical to support their wellbeing. Based on examples from the literature, we illustrate how IPLC participate in restoration activities maintaining traditional practices, restoring land degraded by outsiders, and joining outside groups seeking to restore ecosystems. Our review also provides examples of how Indigenous and local knowledge can be incorporated in the planning, execution, and monitoring of restoration activities. However, not all restoration initiatives engaging IPLC are beneficial or successful, and the factors that lead to success are not fully known. While local involvement in restoration projects is often mentioned as an element of success, this is primarily associated to projects that actively involve IPLC in co‐designing restoration activities affecting their territories, ensure both short‐term direct benefits to IPLC and long‐term support of the maintenance of restored areas, and recognize IPLC local traditions and customary institutions. Based on these examples, we argue that IPLC should be a more important focus in any post‐2020 CBD agenda on restoration.
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When agricultural commodities are traded globally, consumer demand in one region influences the crops planted in another, often leading to widespread environmental and social transformation at the production sites. As a commodity crop that prospers in tropical environments, oil palm has become controversial for its role as a driver of deforestation and social conflict, especially in main producer countries in Southeast Asia. As suitable land for oil palm production in Southeast Asia is depleting, companies have begun to look to new production frontiers, such as Latin America. Colombia and Peru have the highest percentage growth in the sector in recent years, and the crop has become a dominant strategy for development in the Peruvian Amazon. Between 2000 and 2015, 40,000 hectares of old growth forest have been cleared for large oil palm plantations in Peru. Company-Community partnerships (CCPs) have been advanced as a potentially more socially and environmentally sustainable strategy, through their alleged capacity to provide greater productivity and more efficient land use on smallholder farms. This paper describes the social, political and deforestation impact of an oil palm CCP at the forest frontier in the Peruvian Amazon. An interdisciplinary and mixed methods research approach was employed, including long-term ethnographic work and visual measurement remote sensing of land use change on 2447 hectares of smallholder land in four villages/communities. The results show that the recent arrival of powerful private companies has caused a major socio-ecological shift on the ground, particularly through the CCP. On comparing participating farms to non-participating farms, we find significant deforestation 'spillage' out of the plantation into participating farms. A major underlying driver of the negative outcomes of the CCP is the neoliberal policy approach employed by the Peruvian government, which has outsourced basic rural public works to private companies. We conclude by discussing how a more socially and environmentally just oil palm production strategy in Peru and elsewhere might look.
The concept of ecosystem services is influencing how environmental stakeholders pursue dual conservation and community development goals. While rapidly growing in popularity, the ecosystem services approach has been criticized for adopting a homogenous approach to communities and failing to consider social diversity and associated power structures influencing access to benefits. In this paper, we adopt an environmental justice lens to analyse access to ecosystem services in a case study of community forestry in Nepal. Using mixed methods, our disaggregated analysis shows that access to ecosystem services is differentiated by social characteristics such as caste, income and gender with uneven distributive outcomes and participation. High-income groups were able to disproportionately access the benefits despite the social equity provisions built into policy and institutional structures. Our study shows that some of the protections oriented at assisting disadvantaged groups were experienced as onerous and should be amended if they are to have beneficial outcomes. In highlighting entrenched inequities, we argue that the ecosystem services approach needs to make environmental justice more central to avoid further marginalising the marginalized, and have far and just outcomes. The current emphasis on aggregated analysis may contribute little to practically implementing programs that will contribute to sustainable socio-ecological wellbeing.
Enterprising Nature explores the rise of economic rationality in global biodiversity law, policy and science. To view Jessica's animation based on the book's themes please visit http://www.bioeconomies.org/enterprising-nature/. Examines disciplinary apparatuses, ecological-economic methodologies, computer models, business alliances, and regulatory conditions creating the conditions in which nature can be produced as enterprising. Relates lively, firsthand accounts of global processes at work drawn from multi-site research in Nairobi, Kenya; London, England; and Nagoya, Japan. Assesses the scientific, technical, geopolitical, economic, and ethical challenges found in attempts to 'enterprise nature'. Investigates the implications of this 'will to enterprise' for environmental politics and policy.
Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry. The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace. © 2005 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. All rights reserved.
Examining the science of stream restoration, Rebecca Lave argues that the neoliberal emphasis on the privatization and commercialization of knowledge has fundamentally changed the way that science is funded, organized, and viewed in the United States. Stream restoration science and practice is in a startling state. The most widely respected expert in the field, Dave Rosgen, is a private consultant with relatively little formal scientific training. Since the mid-1990s, many academic and federal agency-based scientists have denounced Rosgen as a charlatan and a hack. Despite this, Rosgen's Natural Channel Design approach, classification system, and short-course series are not only accepted but are viewed as more legitimate than academically produced knowledge and training. Rosgen's methods are now promoted by federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, as well as by resource agencies in dozens of states. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Lave demonstrates that the primary cause of Rosgen's success is neither the method nor the man but is instead the assignment of a new legitimacy to scientific claims developed outside the academy, concurrent with academic scientists' decreasing ability to defend their turf. What is at stake in the Rosgen wars, argues Lave, is not just the ecological health of our rivers and streams but the very future of environmental science.