Landscapes worldwide are increasingly shaped through global trade, market development, resource exploitation and climate change. This leads to a situation in which agriculture, forestry, biodiversity conservation, mining, housing and other land uses are increasingly competing for space. This conflict hampers the achievement of the sustainable development goals and the only way to strike a balance, is addressing it from an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary landscape perspective. A landscape perspective considers the multi-functionality of landscapes, while understanding their complementarity and potential options for integration. The landscape level is increasingly recognized as the appropriate level to negotiate land use options with multiple stakeholders and to mediate conflicts and promote collaboration between them. This is why we need to learn how to think and act landscape!
During this course, we will think landscape from a biophysical perspective, taking into account ecological and hydrographical processes defining the biophysical potential of a landscape. But we will also look at landscapes from an economic and a governance perspective. Searching the best options for integrating different land uses require facilitated mediation and negotiation, and participatory and transparent decision making processes. It also demands for collaboration between public and private landscape actors, through the development of novel public-private partnership arrangements at the landscape level. Developing such partnership arrangements is not easy, as landscape boundaries do not always tally with administrative boundaries, and inter-sectoral coordination and policy integration may require institutional change. Nevertheless, landscape actors are experimenting with landscape level partnership arrangements across the globe. Multiple are the examples of landscape networks, watershed committees, restoration partnerships and other types of multi-stakeholder initiatives, with varying levels of success. Actors are experimenting with such landscape level arrangements, with varying levels of success.
After the course you will be able to:
