The Deliberative Landscapes Wanderer
When Participatory Approaches Mess up Your Plans
by landscapewanderer | Feb 19, 2020
I never imagined that this man who had brought his herd into this other community’s pastures and flouted the community’s grazing rules, and whose actions had disrupted our training workshop would become a champion of our approach. The Interrupted Workshop I had...
False Dichotomies and Suspicious Phrases in Environment and Development
by landscapewanderer | Jan 19, 2020
Trust in God AND tether your camel! In one version of the story behind this Middle Eastern proverb, which is sometimes attributed to the Prophet himself, two Bedouin herders get into an argument, one claiming that reality is harsh and that people have to take care of...
Problem Trees, Brainstorming and Storytelling
by landscapewanderer | Dec 19, 2019
I’m sick of problem trees and brainstorming exercises. In initiatives based on a landscape approach, once the various stakeholders with some connection to the landscape have been brought together, often one of the first things they are asked to do is some kind of...
Science, Development, and Pizza Delivery
by landscapewanderer | Nov 19, 2019
For the past seven years I have been working with an international agricultural research institute doing what is often called “research for development”, but I’m about to leave and embark on the next step in my career. And so it seemed like the right time to reflect...
Communal Land Tenure is a Hammer
by landscapewanderer | Oct 6, 2019
It has become accepted wisdom that effective land governance is an unavoidable prerequisite for investment in the future and secure land tenure is the cornerstone of land governance. It is seen as a pillar in the fight against poverty and a precondition for...
Interconnectedness
by landscapewanderer | Aug 28, 2019
We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon...
Are all ecosystems meant to be forests?
by landscapewanderer | Jul 19, 2019
Are all ecosystems meant to be forests? The implied answer to this question, embedded in the way that the increasingly influential sustainable landscapes movement describes itself, is apparently “yes”. The title of one of the leading initiatives—the Global...
Living Skies, the First Leopard, and Values
by landscapewanderer | Jun 19, 2019
Values are different than interests. That difference is captured in the difference between “Why is this place important to you?” and “Why is it really important to you?”
“Stakeholders” and the Spirit of Landscape Approaches
by landscapewanderer | May 19, 2019
For several years, the signposts marking the professional path that I was on were labelled with terms such as community-based natural resource management, community-based conservation, and land tenure. Recently though I turned onto a path marked “landscape approaches”. The signposts on this path promised…
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