Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives
The power of landscape initiatives lies in aligning interests and priorities of key stakeholders, including local communities, practitioners, market actors, and local governments around collective goals, actions, and investment so that they are better able to finance and address the system conditions needed to achieve long-term sustainability impacts at a landscape scale.
With increasing interest and engagement in landscape initiatives, it is critical that all stakeholders have a simple and consistent understanding of the core elements of a mature landscape initiative. Twenty leading landscape practitioner organisations have come together to agree those core criteria and accompanying sub-criteria, as well as present six ways in which they can be used.
The criteria present a roadmap for new and existing landscape initiatives to improve their effectiveness and a means to assess the maturity of these initiatives for different purposes or use cases.
Mature initiatives that have these criteria in place are likely to be more resilient, more attractive to investors, and better placed to deliver more durable sustainability impacts in the landscape.
Core Criteria
Mature landscape initiatives are characterised by four core criteria that are integral to their effectiveness.
- Scale
- Multi-stakeholder governance process or platform
- Collective goals and actions
- Collective monitoring
These core criteria and accompanying sub-criteria can act as a roadmap for developing landscape initiatives to align with over time. The implementation of the core criteria can also act as safeguards, minimising various risks associated with decision-making processes and actions in the landscape, while enhancing positive social and environmental outcomes.
Sub-criteria
The sub-criteria provide further definition to the core criteria and are indicative of mature, high-quality landscape initiatives. The sub-criteria describe conditions that are needed to fully realise the effectiveness of these initiatives. Landscape initiatives will progress to maturity along different pathways and these sub-criteria are guideposts for stakeholders to support that journey.
Guidance
The Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives is available in English, French, Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
If you are interested in the Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives in other languages or would like the print format, please email mariana@isealalliance.org.