On April 12, 2018, NLandscape is organizing a special knowledge session on Land Governance for its members, joined together with international participants of WCDI’s Landscape Governance course. The group explored six landscape governance cases, those of the course participants, to see if new solutions could be identified to governance bottlenecks.

Governance can be described as a process in which policy development and implementation is based on cooperation between representatives from the government, the market and civil society. Together they operate through mixed public and private networks and arrangements, within the decentralised administrative system of states. Landscapes however, are rarely recognised as a formal level within these systems. By lack of formal governance structures, landscape governance is therefore characterised as being a shared responsibility of civil society groups, private sector actors and local governments. In many places, these actors are experimenting with their newly assigned roles as co-developers and implementers of landscape governance. Much is expected from these public-private initiatives, yet little is known about their level of transparency, accountability and decision-making structures. Professionals who are able to facilitate these often complex multistakeholder processes are learning by doing. What are these learnings, what are they doing, can successful models be identified? This and more will be explored.

Programme

12.30 Network lunch

13.15 Welcome and opening

13.30 The Harvest of the Course: Presentation of the Landscape Governance Framework developed by the course participants
14.00 Case pitches: presentation of the cases brought up by the course participants

14.15 Group work: further analysis and discussion of the cases

15.00 Tool 1: Presentation of the Landscape Governance Baseline Assessment Tool by Tropenbos International and discussion of its implications for the cases
16.00 Tool 2: The Environmental impacts. Presentation of Strategic Environmental Assessment Tool (SEA) by Commissie MER and discussion of its implications for the cases

17.00 Synthesis and closing

17.30 Network drinks