Evaluating planning without plans: Principles, criteria and indicators for effective forest landscape approaches

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Effective planning is a key pillar of landscape management, but there are limited tools for evaluating planning, especially where planning is informal or nascent. This paper outlines a novel and robust principles, criteria and indicators framework for evaluating planning in contexts where there is limited formal planning.

Evaluating informal planning is key to assessing landscape management

Sustainable landscape management of primary forests rests on three key pillars: ecosystem integrity, strong governance and effective planning. In many primary forest contexts planning is informal with limited or only nascent formal planning processes occurring. Nonetheless, communities and other stakeholders are making decisions about the future land uses and activities - informal planning that fundamentally impacts forest protection and landscape sustainability. Evaluating these informal planning processes is essential to improving landscape management. However, there are limited tools available to evaluate informal planning.

This paper outlines a principles, criteria and indicators framework for evaluating informal and nascent planning processes, based on planning theory and the data gathered from across the Primary Forests and Climate Project.

The framework is based on three principles of planning:

  1. Shared learning
  2. Holistic integration
  3. Shared justice

The framework provides a practical way to evaluate informal planning processes against these three principles.

Communities and other stakeholders are making decisions about the future land uses and activities, and evaluating these informal planning processes is essential to improving landscape management

The framework provides the basis for qualitative surveys and interviews that gather community and stakeholder views and perceptions of the planning indicators. This allows for a participatory and bottom-up approach to evaluating planning, which also supports shared learning. The planning evaluation is designed to be relatively cheap easy to implement, but also allows for greater sophistication where resources and capacity allow. Crucially, it supports consistent, theoretically grounded and ongoing assessment of 'planning', even when planning is highly informal.

The planning evaluation is designed to be used alongside a governance evaluation and a ecosystem integrity evaluation to provide a complete assessment of current landscape management, and help stakeholders identify key strengths and weaknesses in current processes.

Article authors

Ed Morgan

Dr Ed Morgan is a Research Fellow at the Cities Research Institute, Griffith University. He is developing landscape planning for ecosystem-based climate change adaptation and forest protection.
Dr Brendan Mackey

Brendan Mackey

Project Director and Director of the Griffith Climate Action Beacon at Griffith University, contributing to community planning and engagement in forest projects.

Reference

Morgan, E. A., Osborne, N., & Mackey, B. (2022). Evaluating planning without plans: Principles, criteria and indicators for effective forest landscape approaches. Land Use Policy, 115, 106031. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106031

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