Vision and Planning

Visioning and planning are collaborative efforts to lay out a desired future and design a long-term strategy or roadmap for implementing ILM. Stakeholders negotiate and agree on ways to work together to address problems and their root causes, and to capture unrealized opportunities in the landscape. A key role for LP facilitators is to advance negotiations, informed by the agreed evidence base and analysis of challenges and opportunities, and ensuring that all stakeholders are heard despite power differences. 

Efforts to build a collaborative vision for landscape action are exemplified in Central Lombok, Indonesia and the Altiplano landscape, Spain.

Working collaboratively to develop the action plan involves practical discussions and negotiations on how to align, coordinate and integrate the proposed actions within stakeholders’ existing mandates, work programs and business plans.

Vision and Planning Outputs

Shared vision for a thriving landscape

Once LP stakeholders have a comfortable level of shared understanding of the biophysical and social environment, the challenges and opportunities, and the motivations of other stakeholders, they are ready to develop a joint vision for the landscape. The landscape Vision should be long-term—a generation or more—the time required for transformative change. The high-level vision frames the desired future, the most valued features and functions of the landscape–for its people, its economy, and for nature. Read More

Suggested tools that can help achieve this output
  1. Inspiration: The story of alvelal's 20-year vision creation
  2. Setting Goals and Objectives
  3. Visioning Tool
  4. Why 20+ years?

Landscape strategy with targets (long-term)

Once a shared vision has been crafted, stakeholders can devise the ‘how’—a long-term strategy for pursuing their vision. In the strategy, pathways for sector or area development mutually reinforce one another. For example, the sustainable landscape vision inspires eco-friendly tourism, which sources from local sustainable farmers, enables forest product sellers to enter ‘zero-deforestation’ markets, and together all undertake investments to reduce water pollution that protects human health, aquatic biodiversity, and sustainable community fisheries. Read More

Suggested tools that can help achieve this output
  1. 4 Returns Theory of Change Template
  2. A Landscape Perspective on Monitoring and Evaluation for Sustainable Land Management
  3. Climate Action Planning Guide
  4. Four Quadrants of Change Framework
  5. Make a Visual Theory of Change
  6. USAID Learning Lab: What is this thing called ‘Theory of Change’?

Landscape Action Plan (short-term)

Based on the long-term Landscape Strategy (3.2), the LP members can develop a short-term (typically 2-5 years) Landscape Action Plan to begin implementing the strategy. This process commonly includes an initial stock-taking and spatial mapping of projects, businesses and programs already underway in the landscape that are aligned with the Landscape Vision and Strategy. The Action Plan may involve expanding or linking these. There will usually also be proposals for new activities and investments that are unfamiliar locally, that need to be studied, perhaps through visits to see them in operation outside the landscape or inviting others to share their experiences with the LP. Read More

Suggested tools that can help achieve this output
  1. Work Plans
  2. Collaborative Change: A Communication Framework for Climate Change Adaptation and Food Security
  3. Communication for Rural Development: Guidelines for Planning and Project Formulation
  4. Community-Based Agricultural Development Planning
  5. Logical Frameworks
  6. Timeline

Landscape Finance Strategy

Some public, private and civic projects in the Landscape Action Plan can self-finance or access their usual sources of finance to implement their commitments to the Plan. But others require focused efforts to mobilize the needed finance. The LP may need to mobilize collective action to secure the additional funding, from local, national or international sources. For example, if local banks have a line of credit for conventional coffee production, but not for coffee in agroforestry systems, a group of LP members may need to work with the bank to develop a new line of credit. Projects to be collaboratively funded by different government agencies may require administrative harmonization. To achieve transformational change may involve a large and ambitious landscape investment portfolio, requiring larger and long-term finance. Solutions might include mobilizing large development bank funding, organizing special landscape investment funds, aligning territory-wide public budgets, long-term grant funding to support LP organization, or blended or coordinated public-private-civic finance agreements. To secure such resources, a separate Landscape Finance Strategy may need to be defined, with clear responsibilities for action. This will often involve finding allies in the financial sector and with finance expertise: individuals and institutions aligned with the Landscape Vision and Strategy. These allies can help design the finance strategy, design and develop new financial mechanisms, and identify suitable sources of funding. Read More

Suggested tools that can help achieve this output
  1. BioFin Catalogue of Finance Solutions
  2. BioFin: Steps 6.3-6.5
  3. Landscape Assessment of Financial Flows Phase 1
  4. Land-use Finance Tool
  5. Landscape Investment Finance Toolkit