Cora van Oosten

ABSTRACT Forest landscape restoration is gaining ground, not least because of the role of forests in mitigating climate change. At present, pilot projects are initiated to generate “good practice” and “lessons learned” that can be scaled up to higher levels of policy making. However, landscape restoration is not new. People have always been constructing and restoring their landscapes to safeguard their livelihoods. A better understanding of existing local practice will help in identifying and implementing new restoration initiatives, and assure sustainable outcomes. Understanding local restoration practice means: (a) understanding how the biophysical conditions of landscapes are reshaped over time through the collective decisions of a landscape's inhabitants; and (b) understanding the governance mechanisms underlying these collective decisions. Thinking of governance from a landscape perspective adds a spatial dimension to governance as a means of reconnecting governance to landscape, citizenship to place. This offers the opportunity to cross administrative and political boundaries, allowing for broader groups of actors to engage in spatial decision making. Constructing networks across scales thus becomes an instrument for enhancing learning processes within and between landscapes and a means to scale up good forest landscape restoration practice for wider application at a global scale.

"The Netherlands has lost the strength of its international cooperation". This is stated by Cora van Oosten (Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation) and Rob Wildschut (Hivos), in their contribution to the online discussion of Vice Versa. They state that the ideas forming the basis for the new Dutch international cooperation policy are outdated, and have little content. The State's Secretary's most recent letter to the parliament shows a simplistic vision on international cooperation, and should be replaced by a better one, recognizing the achievements made by the international cooperation sector over the past 50 years, showing deeper insight in processes of global development, and real commitment to international solidarity.

ABSTRACT Southwest Amazonia, a region which consists of Peru’s Madre de Dios, Brazil’s Acre and Bolivia’s Pando (Fig. 8.1), may be perceived as a promising example of a cross-border alliance. Here, in the very heart of the tropical rainforest were Peruvian, Brazilian and Bolivian borderlands meet, local stakeholders have taken the initiative to build regional cross-border partnerships in order to combat their common problems and design and shape their joint development in a sustainable way. Since this process only started a few years ago, it is still too early to determine its larger impact. Nevertheless, the example is interesting enough to see how cross-border partnerships are being constructed and to speculate how they could form a platform for regional integration. The so-called MAP initiative provides an example of how regions could be shaped from below.

ABSTRACT Forest landscape restoration is gaining ground, not least because of the role of forests in mitigating climate change. At present, pilot projects are initiated to generate “good practice” and “lessons learned” that can be scaled up to higher levels of policy making. However, landscape restoration is not new. People have always been constructing and restoring their landscapes to safeguard their livelihoods. A better understanding of existing local practice will help in identifying and implementing new restoration initiatives, and assure sustainable outcomes. Understanding local restoration practice means: (a) understanding how the biophysical conditions of landscapes are reshaped over time through the collective decisions of a landscape's inhabitants; and (b) understanding the governance mechanisms underlying these collective decisions. Thinking of governance from a landscape perspective adds a spatial dimension to governance as a means of reconnecting governance to landscape, citizenship to place. This offers the opportunity to cross administrative and political boundaries, allowing for broader groups of actors to engage in spatial decision making. Constructing networks across scales thus becomes an instrument for enhancing learning processes within and between landscapes and a means to scale up good forest landscape restoration practice for wider application at a global scale.