Key challenges for governing forest and landscape restoration across different contexts

Background

Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) restores ecological integrity, strengthens climate resilience, enhances human well-being, and increases the productivity of deforested or degraded landscapes. By integrating diverse land uses and restorative actions, FLR balances environmental and socio-economic needs. Global agreements, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Bonn Challenge, recognize its importance. Effective governance—defined by clear rules and inclusive decision-making—plays a critical role in ensuring FLR's success.

Goals and Methods

This paper examines the challenges and opportunities of governing FLR across various scales and contexts, highlighting key obstacles and enabling factors for effective governance. It synthesizes findings from diverse studies to identify common governance challenges, explores conditions and strategies for overcoming deficiencies, and connects these conditions to FLR principles.

Conclusions and Takeaways

The study highlights three major challenges in governing FLR: misalignment across government levels and sectors, environmental and social heterogeneity, and insufficient enabling conditions and implementation capacity. To address these challenges, it advocates for multi-stakeholder platforms, accessible tools and guidelines, knowledge sharing, capacity building, polycentric governance, and private-sector involvement. Instead of scaling up governance solutions, the study suggests tailoring them to local contexts. Ultimately, the goal is to establish self-governing restoration systems that provide multiple benefits, support adaptive management, and align local stakeholders' needs and capacities with large-scale restoration objectives.