The West Virginia forest buzzed with energy in June. But it wasn’t the much-heralded emergence of noisy cicadas that caused all the commotion. It was the gathering of members of a global partnership dedicated to reimagining humanity’s relationship by uniting communities to use their land better.
The convening of organizations collaborating as the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People initiative came at a crucial moment: The partnership is about to enter a period of rapid development and global engagement. Over five days of brainstorming and strategizing, 38 attendees from 19 nonprofits, institutions, and networks recommitted their organizations to this transformative endeavor.
Among a packed agenda, the group took stock of their collective successes and difficulties from the design, testing, and demonstration stage. This now-sunsetting phase saw the development of learning modules, the Terraso open-source digital platform, finance mechanisms, and tools to help landscape partnerships secure funding. These are all meant to help landscape partnerships achieve their shared vision for their territories.
Sessions highlight collaboration’s power
The workshop, held from June 18-20, 2024, at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, W. Va., was organized with a clear set of goals: to deepen partnerships, refine models to engage alliances and networks, and develop strategies for mobilizing finance, policy, and influence that impact landscapes at a systems level. The event included sessions where participants shared the highlights of their work, discussed the governance, theory of change, collaborative structure, and service model of 1000L, and addressed the likely challenges in the upcoming scaling phase when the initiative proliferates.
Steve Waddell and Jonny Norton from Bounce Beyond set the tone for the workshop, sponsored by 1000L partner Regen10, by framing it as a transformational journey. One of the key sessions was “1000L—Our Partnership Together,” in which Sara Scherr and Tom Miewald explained 1000L’s journey and the initiative’s value proposition. Through the power of organizations collaborating, they said, 1000L aims to mobilize a global movement of landscape partnerships by offering adaptable frameworks, tools, and financing methods to drive change. 1000L enhances the collective efforts of landscape leaders and their allies and jointly creates the essential infrastructure that individual partnerships cannot easily develop alone.
A significant focus of the workshop was on the Theory of Change (ToC) for the just-launched targeted scaling phase. Forboseh F. Philip, integrated landscape management manager with 1000L partner Rainforest Alliance, presented the ToC, followed by a discussion about its strengths, weaknesses, and key assumptions. Participants provided feedback and engaged in lively debates about the conditions for the ToC to succeed.
Jon Peterson, the director of the Network for Landscape Conservation, echoed the attendees’ concerns that a lack of funding to cooperate and coordinate is a major barrier to financing the transformation that landscapes promise.
“The landscape movement has really grown; it’s self-organizing at different scales,” Peterson said. “People are connecting across these scales to create coordinated actions. We need support to accelerate the ability of landscapes to do their work effectively.”
Another engaging session was the “World Café” setup, where design teams presented their tools and resources developed to empower landscape partnerships. This included presentations on the Terraso Digital Platform, Accelerating Landscape Finance, Capacity Strengthening, Communications and Multimedia Storytelling, Coalition Building, and Landscape Performance Evaluation. Participants moved from table to table, learning about each resource and discussing how they might be applied to their respective landscape partnerships.
Sector-specific needs and growing together
The workshop also featured a panel discussion on sector-specific needs, bringing together representatives from regenerative agriculture, conservation, international development, and business engagement. Each panelist shared their organization’s mission and goals and how they foresee working with landscape partnerships. The discussion enabled participants to consider how different sectors might interact with the suite of 1000L tools and resources and what support services would be most beneficial.
Carlos Agnes, an associate at systems change company SYSTEMIQ working with regenerative agriculture initiative Regen10, said there is a lack of shared understanding of how to transform agriculture. “We need an outcome-based framework that generates evidence so we can reproduce successes in different settings,” he said during the panel discussion. “We believe that landscapes are the way to scale regenerative agriculture–they represent the right scale to deal with externalities that impact the farm.”
Mark Chandler, director of the environment/caring for Earth at development organization Heifer International, agreed that landscapes are how to most effectively knit together individual sustainability and resilience projects. “One of the big benefits of landscapes is that they build coherence to the bits and pieces of Heifer’s support to smallholder farmers,” he said. “Making the shift to landscapes is remarkable–we see dramatic differences in pasture land regeneration.”
A particularly innovative session was “Roles in an Evolving Change System,” in which participants identified their roles within the 1000L system and discussed what they could exchange with each other in terms of knowledge, tools, and resources. This session emphasized the importance of relationships and collaboration in driving landscape transformation.
John Recha, a research scientist at CGIAR who works on climate-smart agriculture, said he saw a critical need for landscapes to join together. That’s why he’s organizing a network in his home country called the Kenya Landscape Actors Platform (KenLAP). “We in Kenya needed to foster collaboration, enhance governance, and mobilize finance,” Recha said. “That’s why we made KenLAP–now we’re coordinating to secure food, biodiversity, and livelihoods.”
The workshop’s final day delved into the principles of collaboration inspired by nature. Participants explored themes of resource efficiency, symbiosis, decentralization, diversity, resilience, interdependence, adaptability, and regeneration. These discussions aimed to lay the groundwork for a powerful landscape transformation system rooted in the natural world’s wisdom.
Reflecting on the workshop, participants expressed renewed commitment and enthusiasm for the next phase of 1000L. The collaborative atmosphere and the opportunity to share knowledge and experiences were crucial takeaways. The average score for deepened partnership and trust was 7.7 out of 10, while the refinement of engagement models and pathways scored 6.1. Despite some challenges, the overall satisfaction with the workshop was high, with 89% of participants expressing satisfaction.
As the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People initiative moves into the Targeted Scaling phase, the insights and connections forged during this workshop will be instrumental. Thanks to the collective efforts of this dedicated group of landscape leaders, the shared vision of a sustainable and equitable future for landscapes worldwide is closer to becoming a reality.
