Understanding the Relationship between Governance and Forest Landscape Restoration

Restoring forested landscapes is being promoted widely as a solution to the world's deforestation and degradation problems, as well as for climate change mitigation and adaptation, for supporting poor rural communities, and for water and soil protection. Yet, while practitioners understand reasonably well many of the technical aspects of forest restoration, they have a much poorer understanding of governance dimensions. Governance challenges come under many guises—financial disincentives, poor institutional set up, unclear tenure and lack of local empowerment, amongst others. Not much has been written to date on forest landscape restoration and governance. This article aims to better understand the governance challenges that practitioners face when restoring forest landscapes and to explore the points of intersection between forest landscape restoration and governance. To achieve this, a broader review of concepts related to governance, forests and landscapes was conducted, followed by a review of existing landscape-scale forest restoration projects to identify the governance factors that have been considered (if any). Findings indicate the need for a more dynamic and process-orientated approach to address governance as it relates to forest landscape restoration. The author proposes a classification for the intersection between governance and forest landscape restoration.