Recognizing the real costs of landscape governance is crucial for effective investment and progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals

As climate shocks intensify, ecosystems degrade, and governments struggle with mounting disaster bills, a quietly critical question is emerging in global sustainability circles: What does it actually cost to govern a landscape well?

For years, research and investment have focused on the technical side of landscape management – new technologies, restoration methods, and farm-level innovations. But beneath every successful landscape initiative lies a less glamorous, often invisible layer: the governance systems that coordinate stakeholders, negotiate trade-offs, maintain institutional memory, and enable long-term resilience.
Yet, as it became clear during the second webinar series of the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscape Science Program, this foundational layer remains chronically underfunded, poorly understood, and dangerously undervalued.

The discussion was moderated by Suneetha Subramania, a Research Fellow with the United Nations University-Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), Tokyo and led by Juan Carlos Ramos, Persimmon Co-Lab Fellow and co-lead for the Landscape Finance Solutions Design team, at the 1000 Landscapes for One Billion People Initiative. The discussion revealed a sector facing a fundamental challenge: everyone agrees governance matters, but almost no one knows what it costs or how to sustain it.

Why landscape governance matters more than ever

Landscape approaches are designed to respond to the complex socio-ecological realities of real places where agriculture, biodiversity, water systems, community livelihoods, and climate impacts converge. Governance is the glue that holds these systems together. Effective governance aligns policies across ministries and sectors; builds long-term visions across political cycles; coordinates investments; integrates local priorities and knowledge; ensures participation and equity; and supports adaptive management as conditions evolve. It is worth hypothesizing that effective and continuous investment in integrated landscape governance, taking into consideration the real-time cost implication for effectiveness and efficiency, would accelerate the achievement of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs).

But despite its importance, governance is rarely funded as a core component. Instead, it is treated as an “indirect cost”, the first line item to be trimmed when budgets tighten. This has serious consequences. “When projects end, coordination ends,” Ramos noted. “The relationships, the investments, the learning, the institutional memory, everything often dissolves. And the next project starts from scratch, and consequently delays the transition to SDGs.”

The price of inaction: rising bills for governments

The financial risks of weak landscape governance are no longer abstract. Around the world, governments are facing skyrocketing disaster losses; accelerating land degradation; biodiversity collapse; water insecurity; stranded infrastructure assets; and unsustainable debt from repeated recovery efforts. Ministries of finance, once distant from environmental issues, now face the fiscal realities of poorly planned landscapes.

“The level of disaster loss is in billions, particularly in highly exposed countries to climate change,” noted Ramos. He pointed out that land degradation, ecosystem services loss, biodiversity loss, and water issues all critically impact financial management at national and local levels.
“The argument is not about returns,” Ramos explained. “It is about avoided losses. Effective governance reduces the cost of inevitable disasters.” In other words, resilience saves money.

A missing piece: real cost data

Despite growing awareness, the sector lacks one essential ingredient – clear, evidence-based cost estimates for landscape governance: What does it cost to maintain a facilitator for five years? To convene multi-stakeholder platforms? To gather and update spatial data? To coordinate ministries?
To anticipate climate risks? To keep communities engaged meaningfully?
No clear answer.

An initiative led by UNU-IAS, 1000 Landscapes, and partners aims to fill this gap by collecting real-world data from landscape practitioners around the globe. The joint effort recognizes that effective governance is fundamentally dependent on adaptive management, multi-level coordination, and participation. The exercise aims to define the costs across six general process steps required for advancing landscape approaches. The goal is to create a minimum viable cost model, a baseline figure that donors, governments, and practitioners can use to plan long-term investments. In addition, a series of products that will be validated with landscape practitioners are planned to be shared across the COPs in 2026. As Subramanian reflected, “It seems obvious, yet it has never been done. Even getting reliable governance cost estimates is new territory.”

The CGIAR multifunctional landscapes science program is engaged in the preliminary survey across flagship landscapes.

The governance–technology gap

A particularly striking point emerged from discussion: landscape governance often determines whether investments in technologies or infrastructure succeed or fail. Millions of dollars are spent pushing new technologies into landscapes – improved seeds, irrigation systems, climate-smart tools. Yet adoption rates remain low, and failures are common. Why?

Because technology transfer collides with inequitable land tenure; power imbalances; institutional fragmentation; local distrust; policy incoherence; and resource conflicts.

Governance, not technology, frequently determines outcomes. Comparing the relatively small cost of governance to the huge losses from failed interventions could be a powerful advocacy tool. Even when thinking of governance as a cost related to developing an infrastructure investment, often in the millions, is comparatively small.

Who should pay?

One unresolved question sparked lively debate: Is landscape governance a public good? If so, governments should fund it. If not, should communities, private actors, or development partners bear the cost?

In practice, the answer is that a joint-up approach is required where all actors contribute to governance, as part of social responsibility.

Government-led platforms provide legitimacy, but political turnover can destabilize them. Corporate-led platforms risk bias. Community-led systems often lack steady financing. The consensus: governance must be a shared responsibility, but credible models for co-financing remain underdeveloped.

The invisible contributions of communities

Several participants underscored that landscapes already function because of significant in-kind contributions from communities: time spent in meetings; traditional knowledge; local facilitation; conflict resolution; monitoring; and collective decision-making. These contributions are rarely captured in financial analyses but are essential to sustaining landscape initiatives over time. Any costing model must acknowledge this.

The way forward: building a shared evidence base

The webinar concluded with a call to action: landscape governance must be recognized as essential social infrastructure—just as critical as roads, crops, or irrigation systems. To make this shift:

• The global community and landscape actors need solid governance cost data.
• Funding models must prioritize long-term operational support, not just project-based bursts.
• Governance must be framed as an investment in resilience and avoided losses, not overhead, and as a critical instrument to accelerate the achievements the SDGs.
• Research and adaptive management need to be embedded within governance systems.
• The field must showcase successful mechanisms and case studies where governance has been sustained.
• Evidence must be shared with policymakers and funders to socialize that governance isn’t an optional cost. It’s a practical investment to build resilience and work on the convergence of the three conventions towards integrated and shared action plans, strategies and investments across sectors.

“If you think the cost of governance is high, think about the cost of lack of governance,” concluded Cargele Masso, Principal Scientists ILRI, and lead, global engagement, advocacy, and co-learning for the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science program.

With climate risks accelerating and ecosystems under strain, the price of inaction is no longer acceptable. The time has come to invest in the systems that hold landscapes and communities together towards the achievement of the SDGs.

By Wandera Ojanji