Thinking outside the plot: addressing low adoption of sustainable land management in sub-Saharan Africa

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2015.07.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Sustainable land management (SLM) can act against land degradation.

  • Ecological, social and economic factors constrain adoption of SLM.

  • Approaches to SLM need to be flexible and tailored to local settings.

  • The landscape approach offers new opportunities for incentivising SLM.

  • Transdiciplinarity is vital to devise solutions which balance multiple objectives.

Sustainable land management (SLM) is seen as the best way to combat and even reverse land degradation. Despite extensive past efforts to promote SLM to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, adoption remains low. Research suggests that this is largely the result of social and economic drivers of land degradation which can vary from household to regional levels. We argue that to get a better understanding of these drivers, and to incorporate them into planning and implementation, a landscape approach that pays close attention to ecosystem services and livelihoods on a broader scale is necessary. Incorporating this wider lens calls for a transdisciplinary approach that brings together multiple perspectives into a common frame.

Section snippets

The adoption challenge: the importance of context

Preventing and reversing land degradation is critical for achieving food, water and energy security, as well as for mitigating climate change and reversing biodiversity loss [1, 2]. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), land degradation is widespread, resulting in serious negative ecological, social and economic consequences, particularly in smallholder farming systems. Over half of the total population (58.8%) of SSA work in agriculture (the majority assumed to be in smallholder production systems) and

A focus on livelihoods and institutions

Frequently SLM initiatives place land health first and livelihood improvements a distant second. This approach has often resulted in considerable failure in adoption. SLM interventions that focus most on land health, often fail to pay sufficient attention to the costs and benefits and perceptions that shape farmers’ adoption [17]. SLM often involves significant upfront investment in labour, and sometimes inputs, and forces farmers to thus make choices amongst a variety of activities that

The importance of the wider landscape

For SLM initiatives to ultimately result in sustainable farming systems, managing food, water and energy at the landscape level is key. Landscapes contain many different resource niches, resource users and institutions. They are connected to other landscapes through both biophysical and social dynamics. These multiple scales of connectivity (between institutions and social processes) have an impact on individual land users’ decisions regarding SLM. Constraints to adoption, and trade-offs

The transdisciplinary approach

Our discussion so far has suggested how improving SLM adoption in SSA will need solutions which balance economic, environmental and social requirements of multiple stakeholders from farm to landscape scales [58, 59]. To adequately confront this complexity, a transdisciplinary approach is required. Building on the concept of ‘wicked problems’ [60], transdisciplinary research addresses complex ‘real world’ problems to which there are usually no clear solutions that can be developed by science

Conclusions

We have argued that in order to improve adoption of SLM, SLM initiatives need to place more emphasis on understanding how livelihoods will be affected by SLM interventions as well as how livelihood strategies may limit SLM adoption. Furthermore, it is critical to understand how institutions shape the adoption, or non-adoption, of SLM at both the farm and landscape scale. Finally, a transdisciplinary approach that integrates multiple perspectives and stakeholders can help to bring these strands

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgements

This preparation of this paper was supported by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) as part of the project ‘AGORA: Acting together now for pro-poor strategies against soil and land degradation’. We thank Hannah Janetschek and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments during manuscript preparation and Rolf van der Sanden for editing the manuscript.

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