Despite substantial investments to curb tropical deforestation, effective conservation incentives for Indigenous peoples and local communities is not well-defined and generally under-researched. This study assessed an incentive mechanism in Peru for Indigenous communities that protect enrolled forests to explore whether the stated program goals are actualized in programmatic elements like the requirements, monitoring, and assessment of prioritized outcomes. The research team worked with Indigenous partners to develop key questions regarding how the mechanism could better support their values of conservation and development. Data were sourced from interviews with implementation experts and participants in eight Indigenous communities, a review of programmatic documents, and an assessment of nationally aggregated community data. The results revealed challenges in program capacity, a lack of cultural awareness, and a reliance on capitalistic economic indicators that exclude other aspects of well-being important for Indigenous peoples. We find that the program’s success indicators do not adequately align with conservation or social realities on the ground and that enhanced indicators are needed to ensure success and avoid negative unintended consequences. We demonstrate that enhancing the assessment of governance, economics, engagement, and social inclusion can improve the design, implementation, and monitoring in this and similar programming. We conclude with generalizable recommendations for establishing requirements and monitoring in existing and future conservation incentive programs that target Indigenous communities.

Abstract This chapter presents ways of enhancing justice in international landscape restoration. Departing from the three-dimensional environmental justice framework, we draw from decolonial and indigenous justice perspectives, placing particular attention on epistemic justice, relational ontology, self-determination, and self-governance. Current international landscape restoration is embedded in (neo)colonial and neoliberal protection efforts, which risk injustice, violence, and oppression; including denying, ignoring and/or erasing local epistemologies, politics, and histories; and weakening local people’s rights and access to territories and livelihoods. Major barriers to effective, just, and equitable landscape restoration include: (i) prioritizing global over local knowledge systems, logics, and politics; (ii) targeting small-scale over large-scale drivers of land degradation; (iii) offshoring burdens onto local peoples; and (iv) relying on state authority and institutional structures, thereby bypassing customary and indigenous authorities. We propose a set of questions and conditions for policymakers and scholars to reflect upon when designing and analyzing landscape restoration efforts.

Forests are increasingly prominent in global policy discussions. Conservation, sustainable management, and restoration of forests are widely understood as necessary to reach climate and biodiversity goals. This attention to forests is vital. However, it risks overshadowing or, worse, undermining the livelihoods and well-being of the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who live in or near forests, especially Indigenous Peoples and marginalized groups. New international commitments to plant trees and halt and reverse deforestation and degradation are intensifying demands on forests and other lands. What are the implications of these shifts for the rights, livelihoods, and wellbeing of those living in forest and tree-based landscapes? What new thinking and evidence exists to help advance knowledge and policy on this topic? And what do current dynamics suggest for future research? The articles in this Special Issue on “Trends in Forest Livelihoods Research” respond to these questions. This introduction contextualizes current research at the forest-livelihoods nexus and provides an overview of the 18 articles compiled in this volume. We identify three key themes and two cross-cutting social sustainability concerns that emerge from this collected work. We conclude by highlighting implications for forest-related policy that better supports local livelihoods and broader sustainable development goals, and by identifying pressing research needs.

Major climate negotiations prominently feature forest protection as one of the most important mechanisms to reduce emissions from the land sector, specifically by the release of greenhouse gases from deforestation and degradation of forested landscapes. However, despite an estimated USD 12 billion pledged to address tropical deforestation, best practices to distribute incentives for conservation activities by Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) are not well-defined and are generally under-researched. Peru holds the second largest share of Amazon Forest – locally and globally important for biodiversity, climate regulation, and carbon storage. Communal landholders make decisions over more than 65% of this ecosystem. As part of an ambitious plan to conserve 79% of its tropical forest (54 out of 68 million hectares), Peru’s Ministry of the Environment (MINAM) has pursued a mechanism called Conditional Direct Transfer (TDC, in Spanish), to stop deforestation that uses incentives to shape behavior and decision-making.While some communities conserve forests successfully under the rubric of the program, others decline to participate or are suspended for non-compliance. Considering the persistent pressure anticipated on Amazonian forests, we ask: How can TDCs be improved to achieve long-term conservation and development objectives? In this paper, we share these results to argue that a systematic assessment of the following categories---Governance, Economics, Participation, and Social Impacts—can effectively provide a strong foundation for design, implementation, and subsequent monitoring of incentive programs around the world. The conclusion includes an overview of generalizable recommendations for Program Implementers in consideration of responsibility and best practices.

Over the past two decades, growing recognition of forest-based Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) sparked forest tenure reforms to formalize IP and LC rights to forests and forest lands through a variety of mechanisms. Nevertheless, tenure security, an intended objective of such reforms, has received less attention, despite being integral to the life and livelihoods of IPs and LCs and important for forests. Formal rights - a title, certificate or contract - is often used as an inadequate proxy for security, though the need to understand perception has been increasingly recognized. But understanding perceptions around tenure (in)security also raises the challenge of unpacking what people mean when they say they perceive tenure to be secure or insecure. This article explores perceptions of tenure (in)security using a novel approach – Participatory Prospective Analysis (PPA), a multi-stakeholder foresight scenario-building method. The research explores tenure security scenarios in Indonesia, Peru and Uganda drawing on results from a series of workshops implemented in 2015 and 2016 primarily at subnational level, with 177 government officials, practitioners and members of community level organizations involved in forest tenure reforms. Four women-only workshops (three subnational and one national) were organized in Peru and Uganda with an additional 87 participants. The results demonstrate the immense depth and complexity of tenure security and insecurity perceptions and the interplay of multiple factors driving toward and away from desirable futures. The method also demonstrates the benefits of PPA for bringing together different perspectives and promoting mutual understanding without reducing complexity. The article contributes to efforts to find common ground not only around how tenure (in)security is defined but also how it is being assessed; and points to the need to embrace more holistic approaches in practice for the future of forest dependent communities and forest landscapes.

This preliminary assessment of rights-based approaches (RBAs) seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussions of RBAs for Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs). RBAs purposefully position the recognition of, respect for, and access to individual and collective rights as central to an initiative’s planning, design, implementation, process monitoring, and outcomes. In mainstream climate change, conservation, and development programs and policies, this means refocusing the relationship between “beneficiaries” and “implementers” to one of rights-holders and duty-bearers. RBAs hold growing discursive importance in relation to the rights of IPs and LCs in conservation and climate change spheres, including the agendas of international agencies. The growing interest in RBAs, and their inclusion in frameworks that will guide development, conservation, and climate projects over the next decade, is laudable. However, there are few reviews that seek to understand how RBAs emerged and how they have been conceptualized. Such analysis is a necessary basis from which to advance discussions on the impact of RBAs and provide lessons to support them. In this review, our primary interest is the conception, conceptualization, and implementation of RBAs in forest-based initiatives, but we reviewed the wider scholarly and gray literature on RBAs in development, conservation, and climate action initiatives.

This chapter provides a much-needed elaboration of what exactly is involved in excellent facilitation – a set of skills, attitudes and competences that are rarely spelled out and often go under-recognized. Any practitioner of ACM recognizes how central good facilitation is to bringing about a successful ACM process. This chapter deconstructs the process at both the community level and at broader scales, as community-identified needs spiral out and up to relevant hierarchies. Attempts to use ACM or similar approaches in the many arenas where we feel it can contribute will require much broader understanding of the complexities of effective facilitation.

There is broad acceptance that Indigenous Community Lands (ICLs) can be effective entities in the global effort to tackle deforestation and climate change. However, empirical evidence has not always been consistent in demonstrating this. Furthermore, analyses are often short-term, and use only large-scale Earth Observation methodologies. This article explores deforestation and reforestation dynamics over 415,749 hectares of 25 titled ICLs in the Peruvian Amazon over forty years at three scales: total area, regions, and communities. We use a multi-method approach linking remote sensing with ground verification, and qualitative historical political ecology work with indigenous communities. We find that overall accumulated deforestation was low at 5%, but that when reforestation is considered, net deforestation was only 3.5%. At the community level deforestation and afforestation dynamics are complex, except for one period that indicates a macro driver in the region. Our work with communities highlights that categorizing them and their lands as inherently pro-environment or not is unhelpful for determining fund flows to ICLs for environmental or development purposes. Furthermore, results suggest inadequate accounting for forest regeneration on titled ICLs, which strongly supports the titling of ICLs for pro-environmental outcomes, and we engage in a novel way with the debate on exclusion. Our study challenges the notion that presenting stakeholders with accumulated forest loss values is helpful in tropical areas where forests and people are dynamic and regenerative.

Virtually all major efforts to address global problems regarding land and resource use call for a multi-stakeholder process. At the same time, there is growing interest in, and commitment to, inclusion of previously marginalized groups – e.g., Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs), smallholders, and women in these groups – in decisions related to sustainable land and resource governance. Nevertheless, multi-stakeholder platforms and forums (MSFs) tend to be idealized as imagined spaces for collaboration among equals, despite ample prior research demonstrating that fostering equity in such “invited spaces” is no easy feat. This article draws on a comparative study of 11 subnational MSFs aimed at improving land and forest use practices in Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Peru. It analyzes data from interviews with more than 50 IPLC forum participants to understand their perspective on efforts to address equity in the MSFs in which they are participating, as well as their opinion of the potential of MSFs in comparison with other participants. The research sought to understand how MSFs can ensure voice and empowerment and address inequality, and thus be accountable to the needs and interests of IPLCs. The interviews show that IPLCs are overall optimistic, but the results also provide insights into accountability failures. The article argues that to bring about change – one that takes equality, empowerment and justice seriously – there needs to be greater strategic attention to how marginalized groups perceive their participation in multi-stakeholder processes. It builds on the lessons from the literature and the findings to propose specific ways that MSFs might foster the collective action or counter power that less powerful actors need to hold more powerful actors accountable.

As forest tenure reform is mainstreamed around the world, outcomes are increasingly determined by the institutions that are responsible for administering its operationalisation and translating policy into implementation. This global study examines state institutional contexts of tenure reform in Kenya, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, and Peru. Interviews were administered in 2016–2017 using a fixed questionnaire applied across all countries involving 26–32 respondents from state implementers of forest tenure reform in each country for a total of 145 respondents. Although our study engagement was tailored for specific country contexts, we identified generalisable forest tenure reform trends through comparative analysis. Findings situate the overall bridging role that state institutions play in forest tenure reform, which we describe as falling under three key overarching coordination functions, namely: coordination among implementers, coordination of objectives, and coordination of resources. These three categories provide insights not only for gauging the progress of a country's forest tenure reform, but also for evaluating how robust reforms have been, and where forest tenure reforms are headed in the future.

. Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) are the subject of increasing attention and investment in the domain of collaborative natural resource governance, yet evidence-based guidance is slim on policy and investment priorities to leverage the MSP approach. We provide a comparative analysis of eight landscape-level MSPs spanning seven countries (Peru, Brazil, India, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and a cross-border case from Kenya and Somalia), representing a diversity of resource systems covering forests, rangelands, and multiuse agricultural landscapes. Applying an adapted social-ecological systems framework, our synthesis identifies the influence of these MSPs on patterns of stakeholder interaction and draws implications for the design and organization of MSPs that are both appropriate and effective. From the cases, we distill lessons addressing: (1) how to design an MSP in relation to the governance context, including the fit between institutional and ecological dimensions of the system and with attention to cross-scale linkages; (2) how to implement inclusive processes that address power inequities, including through capacity building and procedural rules; and (3) how to support adaptive learning to expand the MSP’s influence over time, including monitoring outcomes, adapting the scope of stakeholder engagement, and investing in MSP durability.

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary tenure arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document. But this process can be time-consuming and complex, and in contrast, companies can acquire land relatively quickly and find shortcuts around regulatory burdens. This article reviews and maps 19 community land formalization and 14 company land acquisition procedures is 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Comparing community and company procedures identifies multiple sources of inequity.

Sarmiento Barletti's introduction of a tool for use in multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) follows on naturally from Chapter 6, which looked at the evolution of MSFs within ACM efforts (in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ghana). Sarmiento Barletti, whose ACM research began later than most contributors, initially reports the findings of a realist synthesis review of the MSF literature, thereby establishing some key parameters that affect the success or failure of an MSF.

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are coordination spaces that enable discussions, negotiations, and joint planning between different kinds of actors. Proponents of MSFs claim that bringing different actors to the same table may help solve complex problems. Nevertheless, an MSF's process and outcomes are affected by its leadership and whether participants are able to trust each other. This paper examines the influence of trust and leadership in three MSFs addressing land and resource use in three subnational jurisdictions in Indonesia. The comparative analysis of semi-structured and Q-methodology interviews carried out with MSF participants and non-participants demonstrates the following. First, that the presence of conflicting interests of different stakeholders can hinder trust-building and cooperation. Understanding the historical relationships between stakeholders, including any positive informal relationships, is necessary to build a better strategy to handle antagonism and improve collaboration. Second, different challenges within MSFs require different kinds of leadership. A shared leadership may work in an MSF with participants with a history of positive relationships. A charismatic leader is preferable in MSFs with conflicts of interest or where participants are yet to trust each other.

This chapter takes us to another Indonesian island, Sulawesi; and to a second generation of ACM-style research and action. It examines what design elements change when opportunities appear and a group addresses new challenges. The chapter examines important landscape principles and how a PAR process can contribute to environmental sustainability, observing also the link between PAR and multiple stakeholders' hopes for greater accountability. The Indonesian examples provide additional evidence of the enduring nature of the bonds of trust and communication that a PAR process can initiate – showing also its feasibility at an intermediate scale. The successful devolution of rights to manage a local forest, now recognized more broadly, also echoes the findings of Yuliani et al., in Jambi, Sumatra.