Livelihood in Northern Ghana. Woman cleaning maize in Gwenia, Kassena Nankana District – Ghana. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR-ICRAF

Community members in Zambia and Ghana share a common desire: resilient landscapes that can enhance their livelihoods. Yet, achieving this in the face of competing interests and entrenched power imbalances remains a challenge.

Alida O’Connor, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, shared insights from interviews conducted in the Southern Zambia’s Kalomo District and Northern Ghana’s Western Wildlife Corridor (WWC) during the Forests & Livelihoods Assessment, Research, and Engagement (FLARE) annual meeting in Rome from 3-7 October 2024.

“Both landscapes face interconnected challenges from unpredictable rainfall patterns, deforestation driven by charcoal production and agriculture, conflicting policies and disputed land boundaries, heavy dependence on chemical fertilizer, and siltation of rivers,” said O’Connor, a team member in COLANDS: Collaborating to Operationalise Landscape Approaches for Nature, Development and Sustainability.

“Despite the geographic separation, community members voiced similar concerns: the prioritising of meeting immediate needs over longer-term strategies to improve natural resource management; securing resources to support collaborative processes; land tenure; conflicting government policies; and trust,” said O’Connor, whose team conducted 78 in-depth interviews and 13 focus group discussions in the two countries over several months.

“Ultimately, a key takeaway was that most participants wanted the same thing, resilient landscapes capable of sustaining local livelihoods,” said O’Connor.

Integrated landscape approaches: A path forward

How can these goals be achieved?

This is where Integrated Landscape Approaches (ILAs), the focus of COLANDS, come into play. Engaging a spectrum of stakeholders and addressing inherent power dynamics over the long term are key components of ILAs, which aim to tackle interconnected challenges that manifest within landscapes, such as biodiversity loss, climate change impacts, food insecurity and persistent poverty.

A basic assumption of ILAs is that collaboration across scales, sectors and diverse social groups is essential to achieve more equitable and sustainable landscape outcomes. “This marks a significant departure from conventional sectorial management,” said O’Connor, “and towards more inclusive and integrated systems.”

Implementing an ILA means reconciling the competing interests of diverse actors and groups – including women, youth, the elderly, and pastoralists, often marginalised. “At the same time, strengthening collaboration is crucial to transforming governance structures for more equitable socio-economic and environmental outcomes,” said O’Connor. “This requires time to understand stakeholder priorities, challenge existing power dynamics and build trust.”

Gendered dimensions of resource management

Meanwhile, other research topics explored by COLANDS team members during sessions at the five-day FLARE event included the importance of wild foods for household well-being in Zambia and the regulation of deforestation-free products.

Sustaining the natural resources needed for women’s livelihood activities was a key concern and priority expressed by women in both Zambia and Ghana. “But their circumstances were quite different,” said O’Connor. 

In Zambia, women’s vegetable gardens provide essential nutrition and income but face increasing threats from water scarcity and declining soil fertility. In northern Ghana, women depend on harvesting shea, African locust beans and baobab trees for income. However, these activities are jeopardised by deforestation driven by charcoal production, agricultural expansion, illegal mining and bushfires.

In Ghana, finding consensus on shared  issues of common concerns and generating a collaborative vision for the Western Wildlife Corridor (WWC) landscape represents an important starting point.”However, significant investment is essential to adapt and strengthen governance structures, build capacity for natural resource management and transform the collaboratively produced vision into reality,” said COLANDS team leader James Reed.

“Understanding local perspectives and achieving community buy-in are critical for the success of conservation and development objectives,” said Reed during a separate FLARE session.

O’Connor’s findings reinforce this point, demonstrating that “communities facing significant land cover change and rapid deforestation share a preference for more inclusive landscape governance and restoration – even when those communities are geographically distinct landscapes,” said Reed.

Amid increasing interest in the potential of  ILAs, the time is right to make significant long-term investments in landscapes that offer high transformative potential. “These investments could improve local livelihoods while improving natural resource management and preserving biodiversity,” added Reed.

“The enthusiasm for more sustainable and inclusive governance of multifunctional landscapes represents a unique window of opportunity for collective action,” Reed concluded.

Acknowledgements

COLANDS is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI) and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU). PhD research that is part of COLANDS is hosted at the Institute for Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam and the University of British Columbia.

For more information about COLANDS work, please contact James Reed at J.Reed@cifor-icraf.org.