The Deliberative Landscapes Wanderer
In Defense of Community
by landscapewanderer | Apr 19, 2021
In conservation, natural resource management, disaster risk reduction and various other fields, community-based approaches have been very popular, bathed in a glowing light of all that is participatory, bottom-up and democratic. But they have also attracted a widely...
Four virtues for landscape approaches
by landscapewanderer | Mar 19, 2021
In the fields of natural resource management and environmental governance, programs, projects, and advocacy often address structural factors at the community level, the landscape level or the national level, but tend to focus much less on individual behavior, except...
The webinar pandemic
by landscapewanderer | Feb 19, 2021
The downside of virtual meetings The COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions have forced people to make more use of virtual meeting technologies. People are organizing workshops, meetings and other kinds of interactions that in the past would have only happened by...
Participatory ecosystem management, jazz, and the obsession with scaling
by landscapewanderer | Dec 20, 2020
In the international development and global conservation worlds, there is a preoccupation with scaling. Doing something positive in a single community is nice, so the thinking goes, but can never be enough. If we identify something that makes one community, or one...
The inconvenient implications of community-driven development
by landscapewanderer | Nov 19, 2020
Motherhood, participatory approaches and apple pie. I’m on the board of an organization that is in the midst of some soul searching about its role in natural resource management, land rights, landscape approaches, and community-based conservation. These are things...
Objectives for the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists
by landscapewanderer | Oct 19, 2020
Objectives of the IYRP During its meeting in late September and early October of this year, the United Nations Committee on Agriculture (COAG) endorsed the proposal to declare 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). There are further...
Against IPAT
by landscapewanderer | Sep 19, 2020
I recently had a lively conversation with my teenage daughter about our environmental footprint, a concept that she was studying in school. Like a lot of young people, she is quite concerned about the direction the world is going, about how many planet Earths we...
When NOT to use a landscape approach
by landscapewanderer | Aug 21, 2020
I am generally optimistic about approaches for environmental management and governance that are based on dialogue and deliberation, bringing together diverse stakeholders, and searching for common ground. And I am, obviously enough, a believer in the potential of...
Why can’t we get past the “tragedy of the commons”?
by landscapewanderer | Jul 19, 2020
Last year I postponed a rant about the ill-named “the tragedy of the commons” concept. I can contain myself no longer. Since Garrett Hardin published his influential 1968 paper of that name, decades of scholarship has shown that he got it wrong. In the right...
Asking ourselves questions about race, environmentalism and inspiration
by landscapewanderer | Jun 19, 2020
Regular readers of the Deliberative Landscapes Wanderer may see in this post a deviation from the topics I normally cover. The turmoil unfolding in the United States of America right now seems to have captured the attention of the whole world, including me, and the...
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