Event Type: Learning Café

This session will give insight into participatory landscape governance from an indigenous perspective. How has landscape governance been shaped over centuries by traditions, customs and local practices? What roles have been played by the various parties involved in this governance? What are the critical factors for success? What is the key to balancing ecological, economic and socio-cultural interests simultaneously? Let’s hear from indigenous leaders about the ways they have worked on landscape governance, and their ideas about what makes it work well.

Tree Tracker is an android app based tool that creates a transparent link to trees/planters, and collects valuable data on their tree planting efforts. It helps to make living trees more profitable while creating employment opportunities by linking existing funds to local tree planting initiatives. During the session people can find the tool on their own mobile phone, and join the interactive restoration platform themselves.

Greener.land is an online tool that helps you to choose low-tech, low-cost intervention techniques and help you decide which intervention is best suited to the characteristics of the landscape where you work or live. During this session, participants will be invited to take the role of our Technical Advisory Board and Investment Committee to improve and enhance the tool.

OpenForests has built a platform, Explorer.land, through which landscape stories can be presented, shared, and learned from. Here, we will present and discuss a tool set that helps landscape communicators to:

• Tell an authentic landscape story that resonates;
• Provide the right context in space and time to build a strong story;
• Improve their stories and build trust by making use of open data.

During the session, we will invite participants to share their own project stories, and will showcase projects that use Explorer.land to make their stories visible in an interactive platform. After the session and during the entire GLF, event participants will be able to share their project stories on Explorer.land, and we will help them to make these stories visible through the platform.

The Landscape Approach is often focused on land use and land rights. But what about water? Balancing competing land use demands requires water to be taken into account. The value of land is highly dependent on the availability of water. Land cover and land management determine the flow of water, and therefore determine where, when and to whom water is available. Land tenure is decisive for investments, but water is decisive for its use. The issue of water rights has been widely covered in academic literature, but in practice the interlinkages, challenges and opportunities of water rights are often missed. During our session we will use examples from Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Bangladesh to open a lively discussion on the role and importance of water to the effective operationalisation of a landscape approach.