Engaging Landholders and Communities in Conserving and Restoring Tropical Forest Landscapes

Graduate / Professional

The design and implementation of sustainable land management strategies in tropical forest landscapes must effectively involve the people and communities who manage and govern these regions. In many cases, however, practitioners design projects that focus on technical solutions only and ignore people altogether, or base their projects upon incorrect assumptions about the people at the heart of their interventions. These trends ultimately lead to project failure and can cause a host of adverse unintended consequences that further exacerbate the problems that practitioners were trying to resolve. This pattern is particularly prevalent with recent pledges by global organizations and national governments to plant trillions of trees around the globe in an effort to address the adverse effects of climate change (The Bonn Challenge and Trillion Trees). While these initiatives are well-intended, they largely ignore the sociocultural and political complexities of the landscapes where the trees would be planted, including whether landholders already plant or protect trees and if they want to increase this practice and how; which species they want to plant or protect and how; and the effects of tree planting on land tenure systems, traditional livelihood strategies, and gender dynamics. Little attention is also given to examining who removed the trees from the landscape and why and whether tree planting is an appropriate solution. 3 Course cr 9am-12:30pm