Building Innovation Systems for Managing Complex Landscapes

T his chapter guides development practitioners in fostering communication and learning to shape innovation systems for managing agriculture and natural resources across landscape systems and to jointly achieve sustainable production, ecosystem/biodiversity, and rural livelihood goals. This ecoagriculture landscape perspective accounts for the physical and biological features of an area together with the institutions and people who influence it. These features are dynamic and encompass diverse sustainable natural resource management practices. The landscape perspective merges ecosystem thinking with multi-stakeholder processes, sustainable production, and good governance of natural resources (International Agricultural Center 2006; Scherr and McNeely 2007). The landscape scale links grassroots, community-based initiatives in sustainable agriculture and integrated natural resource management with wider national or regional goals (Fry 2001). In landscapes managed for sustainable production as well as conservation goals, producers and entrepreneurs are expected to deliver ecological and amenity benefits to society (ecosystem services) while also extracting value from the resources to secure their livelihoods. Interactions among market, public, and civic institutions generate incentives and capacities for producers and entrepreneurs to participate in the equitable allocation of capital resources: natural, human, social, financial, technical. The relationships and coordinating mechanisms of landscape-level gover-nance systems are inherently diverse and subject to persistent change from internal and external sources (Flora 2001; Sayer and Campbell 2004). A robust and adaptive system of innovation is needed, therefore, to enable managers of landscape systems to coordinate and guide the diverse actors and complicated interactions required to realize the desired outcomes. An innovation system comprises the actors—the organizations and people—who develop ideas and turn them into knowledge, information, products, or services. This actor-based concept of an innovation system emphasizes the interaction among people with a stake in the outcome of a management system and the learning required to bring about innovations that they consider important. Social learning is the name commonly given to this interactive process and practice (Engel 1997). The innovation needed to support the management of biological and institutional complexity in multifunctional landscapes is rooted in social learning. The practice of social learning for natural resource management involves generating new insight and knowledge with diverse social actors. It also involves negotiating the development of knowledge processes and products that