Bridging Social Innovation with Forest and Landscape Restoration

Abstract

Mitigating climate change, preventing mass species extinctions, improving rural livelihoods, and disaster risk reduction are among today's most urgent challenges. To meet these challenges, a large number of social actors need to agree to engage and act collectively on Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR), ensuring its dual goal of restoring ecological functionality and improving people's wellbeing. Although FLR has gained momentum globally, the experiences so far continue to face socio-economic and governance challenges associated with the design and realization of effective efforts. Social Innovation (SI) can be seen contemporarily as the process and the result of interaction between stakeholders in the construction of solutions to social needs and problems, including those tackled by FLR. Here, using a content analysis approach applied to existing literature, we propose five possible conceptual bridges between FLR and SI. The Social Innovative – Forest and Landscape Restoration (SI-FLR) process advocates that sustainable livelihood needs should be attended first to ensure the Social-Ecological Systems' resilience. These bridges are: (1) “Landscape as the main context”; (2) “Nature as social need”; (3) “Landscape stewardship groups”; (4) “Governance capabilities”; (5) “Adapting and transforming to enhance resilience.” Identifying these bridges, will help decision-makers and project managers to improve the FLR initiatives by supporting the potential of SI and sparking the interest of other researchers to explore the many possibilities of SI-FLR.