IUCN, Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy (LLS)

The Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy (LLS) was a five-year program implemented by IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and funded by DGIS (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands). The Strategy focused on four main themes: poverty reduction, natural resource-based markets and incentives, forest governance, and landscape transformation. LLS, originally set to finish in December 2010, was granted a no-cost extension and came to a close in December 2011.

It is commonly claimed that forest tenure reform that provides rural people with rights to access and use of forest resources can contribute to improved forest management and poverty alleviation. But, at least with respect to poverty alleviation, there are few experiences with formal forest tenure reform that have demonstrated this to date. Given how difficult it is to achieve pro-poor tenure reform, an important question is whether modest informal changes can achieve results.

This paper examines how interventions intended to improve functionality and productivity of forested landscapes to improve livelihoods of the poorest populations, might actually yield co-benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation. It argues in favour of a ‘landscape’ approach to achieve these co-benefits.

The Doi Mae Salong watershed in the north-west of Thailand is the headwater of the Mae Chan River, a tributary of the Mekong River. As such, it is an extremely important landscape for the economy of the region. The landscape has the particularity of being designated a Military Reserved Area and coming under the control and command of the Royal Thai Armed Forces (RTAF).

This paper focuses on interventions in the Benet landscape of Uganda which sought to improve the income opportunities for inhabitants through efforts to rehabilitate the degraded landscape.

This paper describes Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy interventions in the Wassa Amenfi West Landscape in the western region of Ghana. The landscape extends over an area of about 120,000 ha. It is a mixed landscape with a variety of agricultural uses; the most important is cocoa farming.

This paper focuses on efforts to create value from non-timber forest products in the Acre region in the north-western part of the Amazon region in Brazil.

The Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy Miyun project has generated important lessons about the process of working to improve landscapes and livelihoods in a watershed context. This paper documents and shares these lessons. In particular, it summarizes how the project was conceptualized and implemented, how and why this changed over time, and what its key impacts and achievements have been.

This paper documents insights and lessons about using markets and incentives to strengthen forest landscapes and livelihoods. It aims to interrogate just what a ‘landscape approach’ means in economic terms, to identify how markets can be used to generate incentives to share forest benefits more equitably and sustainably, and to highlight which kinds of approaches and ‘packages’ of interventions can assist in this.

The aim of this manual is to strengthen the community of practitioners who are using an innovative range of visual techniques in dealing with conservation and development situations. Visualization techniques are used to compare visions of stakeholders and to negotiate trade-offs through comparing these visions. Different visualization techniques are already widely used and several of these are discussed in this manual.