Diagnosing institutional needs for landscape management: A practical guide

Multifunctional landscapes aim to balance production, conservation, and livelihoods across many actors and sectors. Such initiatives tend to be constrained or fail more from weak institutions and governance than from weak science (see examples here, here, here, and here). A practical guide for diagnosing institutional needs helps researchers and practitioners ask: Who decides what, at what scale, with what incentives, and with what accountability? Without this, even the best-designed technical interventions get blocked or ignored.

Agricultural landscapes-- conceptualized as landscapes with high relevance of agricultural activities-- encompass approximately half of Earth’s habitable land. The sheer spatial extent of agricultural landscapes in the global land surface and the intrinsic coupled socio-ecological systems characteristics mean that how they are managed fundamentally shape human well-being and its ability to co-exist with the planet. 

From the land-use perspective, agricultural production rarely happens in isolation. Most farming takes place within multifunctional landscapes that include crop fields alongside grazing lands, forests, agroforestry plots, wetlands, and water bodies. These components influence one another through flows of water, nutrients, biodiversity, and human use. Managing such landscapes for sustainability and productivity requires more than good practices at the farm level; it demands institutional arrangements and governance models that can coordinate many actors across space and time, while safeguarding the ecosystem services on which agriculture depends.

While most agricultural landscapes are multifunctional, the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program supports efforts to manage these landscapes more intentionally for enhanced and optimized multifunctionality, balancing needs and interests of human (with high degree of heterogeneity among population sub-groups) and nature, both now and future. 

This post outlines a practical way to diagnose institutional needs for landscape management, focusing on two foundational dimensions: time horizon and spatial scale. It highlights why tenure security is needed for long-term practices, and how coordination mechanisms can be tailored to fit different levels of action.

A simple diagnostic: scale and time

A useful starting point is to place common land-use or water management practices on the two dimensional frame in Figure 1.

• Horizontal axis (time): from within-season activities to investments with returns over years or decades.
• Vertical axis (space): from the plot/farm level through community to landscape scales. 

This framing links two design implications:

• Longer time horizons → higher need for tenure security. Actors invest more when they can reliably reap future benefits.
• Larger spatial scales → higher need for coordination. As actions affect more people and places, collective rules and public institutions matter more.

Here we use highly simplified relations to illustrate how the framework can support rapid assessment, recognizing that the relations are not universal. 

Consider a few examples:

• Annual crops sit at the plot and short-term end. Decisions are primarily individual and returns come within a season. Little formal coordination is needed beyond basic market and extension services.
• Insect management for pollination or pest control remains relatively short-term but spills over beyond a single farm. Coordinating planting dates, habitat strips, or pesticide use across a group of farmers can improve outcomes for all.
• Farm ponds, soil health practices, and agroforestry occur at the plot level but with longer-term payoffs. Without secure rights—or the resources to wait for returns—producers may underinvest unless there’s support (e.g., credit, cost-sharing, or guarantees).
• Soil and water conservation features such as check dams and terracing often sit above the farm level, with returns over years, requiring joint labor, financing, and maintenance.
• Surface water bodies, wetlands, and grazing lands are typically community or higher in scale, with multi-year to decadal horizons.
• Watersheds, forests, wildlife management, and invasive species control are landscape-level with long horizons and multiple stakeholders, often requiring ongoing effort to sustain initial gains.

This mapping is more than a conceptual exercise. It provides a way to match the institutional tool to the task: where to emphasize tenure reforms or guarantees, where to enable collective action, and where to bring in public authorities for coordination.

From individual components to a landscape diagnosis

To make the framework actionable, conduct a structured diagnosis for a specific landscape. Five questions help build the baseline:

1. What are the components? List forests, water bodies, agricultural and grazing lands, and other relevant features.
2. Who are the stakeholders for each? Include direct users, those affected by externalities, relevant government agencies, and private actors.
3. What is the scale of each component? Relate the physical footprint to farm sizes and community boundaries. The same land cover (e.g., a forest) can be a private holding, a group-managed resource, or a whole-community commons, depending on context.
4. What tenure arrangements exist? Document both formal and informal (customary) rights for land, trees, water, fish, and wildlife. Assess how these rights shape incentives and distribute benefits and costs.
5. What coordination arrangements exist above the individual farm? Identify rules, organizations, and norms for shared management.

After reviewing components individually, examine interactions across the landscape. Mapping components spatially can reveal proximity, upstream–downstream relationships, and the directionality of ecosystem service flows (e.g., forests stabilizing flows into downstream irrigation, wetlands filtering agricultural runoff).

Useful cross-component questions include:

• What services does each component provide to—and draw from—others? For instance, forests may supply fodder and pollinator habitat while benefiting from reduced fire risk due to grazing management.
• How do stakeholder groups overlap? Are crop farmers also forest users, or are they distinct groups with aligned or competing interests?
• What institutions coordinate across components? Consider both formal bodies (e.g., watershed committees) and informal norms (e.g., seasonal agreements on grazing or water sharing).

This exercise helps determine whether existing institutions are fit for purpose or whether strengthening (or creating) arrangements could improve both component-level outcomes and the aggregate value of the landscape.

Why tenure security matters

Tenure refers to the legal and customary relationships that define who can use which resources, under what conditions, and for how long, including rights and obligations. While land is central, tenure over trees, water, fish, and wildlife can be equally consequential in a landscape context.

Two points are critical:

1. Security of tenure—the likelihood that rights will be upheld—shapes incentives to invest in long-horizon practices. Formal rights on paper may not translate into effective security if social norms or power dynamics override them (e.g., women’s land rights not respected by the community). Conversely, customary household or community rights that lack state recognition can be vulnerable to appropriation by outsiders.
2. Tenure is often a bundle of overlapping rights—access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and transfer—held by different actors. These bundles create a web of interests even within a single component (say, a forest), and they become more complex as we consider inter-component interactions. Clarity and enforceability of these rights—and how they are distributed—directly affect resource condition, investment incentives, and equity.

Collective tenure can be powerful when paired with strong local institutions (e.g., forest user groups) capable of setting and enforcing rules. But when group institutions are weak, collective tenure can be insecure in practice. The institutional challenge is to align rights, responsibilities, and capacities with the scale and time horizon of management.

Coordination mechanisms that fit the level

A landscape approach assumes a willingness to manage for multiple benefits across components, not just maximize one output. Coordination aligns actions, plans, policies, and investments of diverse users, public agencies, and private actors to reconcile trade-offs and enhance synergies.

• At the group and community level, collective action often suffices: co‑designing rules for forest use, organizing canal cleaning, managing rotational grazing, or coordinating planting calendars. Participation boosts legitimacy, monitoring, and compliance.
• At higher levels, state involvement becomes more important—both for resources under public tenure (e.g., national parks) and for cross-jurisdictional coordination (e.g., watersheds spanning multiple localities). Still, federated user organizations can play a complementary role, linking local user groups across sites and advocating for policy reforms.

Because landscapes are politically and socially heterogeneous, a thoughtful stakeholder analysis helps identify who is involved or excluded, and how different groups interact. A political economy lens can surface interests, power, and potential veto points—useful for anticipating who might block or enable coordination and where common ground might exist.

In many settings, effective coordination requires “coordination between coordinators.” Multistakeholder platforms (MSPs) are a common response. They can provide a forum for negotiation, information sharing, and joint planning across agencies and user groups. But MSPs are not a panacea and often the devil is in the details of implementating the scholarly established principles. Key considerations include whether to build new platforms that mirror the landscape’s actor mix or leverage existing ones with related mandates. Outcomes depend on context (e.g., trust, conflict history, incentives) and structure (e.g., representation, decision rules, facilitation quality, accountability mechanisms).

Implications for practice

Integrated landscape approaches that invest in coordination and institutional strengthening typically require a longer time horizon, but the payoffs can extend beyond environmental gains. Interventions that advance tenure security, equity, and cultural fit are associated with better performance across most objectives—not just conservation—even if production-only metrics may not capture the full benefits immediately. This argues for treating institution-building as a long-term investment in sustainability and fairness.

A practical way forward:

1. Co-create a landscape map of practices and components placed by scale and time horizon. Use it to identify where tenure security and coordination are most critical.
2. Assess tenure security component by component, across land and other key resources. Look for gaps between de jure and de facto rights, with attention to gender and marginalized groups.
3. Match coordination mechanisms to scale. Support collective action where it is sufficient; engage relevant public authorities as the scale expands; consider federated user structures and MSPs where multiple jurisdictions and sectors intersect.
4. Plan for adaptive management. Landscape conditions and actor incentives evolve. Build feedback loops that allow rules and investments to adjust as information and relationships change.
5. Resource the time and capabilities needed. Long-horizon investments require bridging finance, facilitation, and monitoring. Align incentives for agencies and user groups to collaborate over time.
6. Track outcomes across multiple objectives. Monitor ecosystem services, production, equity, and institutional performance to detect trade-offs early and recalibrate.

There is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for governing multifunctional landscapes. But by diagnosing scale and time, clarifying and securing bundles of rights, and tailoring coordination to the appropriate level, practitioners can design governance arrangements that are more likely to be effective, durable, and fair. Think of this work less as engineering a fixed solution and more as gardening: cultivating institutions that can take root, adapt, and thrive alongside the landscapes they are meant to steward.

Note: This blog draws from Meinzen-Dick, R. S. and W. Zhang. 2025. Importance of Tenure and Governance for Multifunctional Landscapes.  CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Position Paper. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/179530

The authors acknowledge the use of Co-Pilot to shorten the draft blog. They have reviewed and revised the AI-generated work and take full responsibility for the content.

Authors: Ruth Meinzen-Dick (IFPRI) and Wei Zhang (IFPRI)