Landscape governance as a source of environmental policy integration:

Landscape governance is increasingly seen as a means to engage landscape stakeholders in multi-stakeholder decision making, through the establishment of multi-stakeholder platforms at landscape level, to harmonise stakeholders’ views and interests, and embark upon a process of joint planning. Yet it is also realised that the outcomes of such joint planning are most often not recognised by and embedded in formal planning processes of states. The major reason for this is that generally, there is an asynchrony between the political-administrative boundaries of states, and the ecological and socio-institutional realities of landscapes. True landscape governance therefore requires a ‘spatialisation’ of governance, as a means to a) reconnect governance to the biophysical conditions of place, and b) reconnect governance to the socio-institutional conditions of place. In Rwanda, forest landscape restoration is high on the political agenda, and landscape governance is increasingly seen as an important part of the process. Several programmes have been implemented at the local level, with impressive results. Currently, the government has launched a policy aiming for ‘Border to Border’ landscape restoration, which covers a range of local projects and programmes to be implemented in a coordinated way. A number of District Development Councils have put forest landscape restoration on their agenda, with the aim to stimulate local authorities to develop landscape restoration plans. Many of these restoration plans focus on agroforestry, as a means to restore forested landscapes in an integrative way, addressing biodiversity, food security and local development goals simultaneously. Local action is assumed to be holistic and integrative by nature, as they emerge out of local reality, and horizontal institutional relations are assumed to be strong. However, local implementation is seriously hampered by the multiple ministerial policies affecting local land use, which are often contradicting. Especially agricultural policies and forestry policies send out different messages and impose contradicting action on the local ground. The current ‘performance contracts’ between local government staff and their line ministries are strictly sectoral and non-integrative, which hamper the realisation of agroforestry on the ground. The case of forest landscape restoration in Rwanda illustrates the current discrepancy between a potential integrated landscape thinking at the local level versus a strictly sectoral thinking at the national level. This is in contradiction with the current international trend of policy integration and the role of landscape governance to make this happen. If landscape governance is to become a source of policy integration, it has to go far beyond the establishment of multi-stakeholder platforms. It rather requires the construction of a long term process of integrative policy making, which is done through the crafting of new institutional arrangements (institutional bricolage) based on biophysical and socio-institutional conditions of place, and ‘navigated’ between local, regional, national and supranational levels of governance.