Integrated landscape management (ILM) is the practice of managing a landscape as a single social-ecological system through a long-term partnership of the people, organizations and sectors that use and govern it, so that farming, conservation, water, settlements and enterprise are planned together.
Overview
Most planning is organized by sector: an agriculture department plans for yield, a water agency for supply, a conservation authority for protected areas, an investor for one project’s return. Each plan can be sound on its own terms while undermining the others, and the flows that connect them (water moving downstream, soil moving off slopes, wildlife moving between patches, labor moving between farm and town) belong to nobody’s plan. ILM brings the parties together around one map of the landscape and one long-term vision, usually spanning twenty years or more, and asks them to coordinate their separate mandates and budgets against it.
The unit of work is the landscape, defined chiefly by function and coherence: large enough to contain the processes that matter to its people and ecosystems, and small enough to be managed by the people who use the land. The body that does the work is the landscape partnership (LP), a coalition that may begin as an informal dialogue platform and mature into a legal entity.
“Integrated landscape management” is an umbrella term. Sara Scherr counted more than 100 overlapping management concepts in 2022, and the partners of the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature initiative adopted ILM as their common label in 2012 [TBV]. The largest current coalition is 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People (1000L), formed in 2019 by Commonland, Conservation International, EcoAgriculture Partners, Landscape Finance Lab, Rainforest Alliance, Tech Matters and UNDP.
For a reader building a BioHub, ILM is the largest documented body of practice on convening a whole landscape. The field’s own 2026 review finds that partnership formation, methods and international endorsement have advanced much further than finance, valuation and public policy. Those weaker areas are the ones the BioConomy’s instruments are designed for, so this page treats the two bodies of work together.
Where the approach comes from
Scherr et al. (2026) trace ILM to Indigenous and community-based governance of forests, pastures and fisheries, and to a modern lineage running through the land ethic, regional planning, McHarg’s Design with Nature, landscape ecology, social-ecological systems research and Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons. Applied movements that fed it include permaculture, integrated natural resource management, the Model Forest network (launched by Canada in 1992), ecoagriculture, and integrated rural development, which the authors note was often criticized as technocratic and top-down.
The approach entered the mainstream in the 2010s through the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature initiative (2011 to 2020) and the Global Landscapes Forum. Sayer et al. (2013) set out ten principles for a landscape approach: continual learning and adaptive management; a common-concern entry point; multiple scales; multifunctionality; multiple stakeholders; a negotiated and transparent change logic; clarification of rights and responsibilities; participatory and user-friendly monitoring; resilience; and strengthened stakeholder capacity. Scherr et al. report formal endorsement of ILM under the UN conventions on climate, desertification and biodiversity and by the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration [TBV]. Adjacent terms (landscape approach, jurisdictional approach, territorial development, bioregional development) differ mainly in their entry point; the glossary entry sets out the distinctions.
What counts as a landscape
The 1000L guide defines a landscape as a social-ecological system of interconnected natural and human-modified land and water ecosystems, shaped by distinct ecological, historical, economic and socio-cultural processes; where water or ocean dominates, it may be called a waterscape or seascape. Scherr et al. give a typical scale of more than 100,000 hectares, while stressing that stakeholders draw the boundary and that it can be far smaller or larger and can shift over time. Boundaries in practice follow administrative lines, ecological lines, cultural territories or commodity sourcing areas. A BioRegion in this wiki’s sense is bounded by ecological systems, so an ILM landscape and a BioRegion can coincide, nest or overlap.
Within the landscape, ILM plans for three purposes side by side: natural habitats; regenerative production and land use; and more sustainable settlements, infrastructure and industry. Commonland calls these the natural, combined and economic zones.
The five elements
The Practical Guide to Integrated Landscape Management (1000L, 2022) organizes the work into five elements and eighteen outputs. The process is iterative: partnerships return to elements as conditions change. The guide expects the full cycle to take at least twenty years. It covers the structure of collaboration and leaves the content of regeneration strategies to local context.
| Element | Outputs the partnership produces |
|---|---|
| 1. Landscape Partnership | Stakeholder engagement strategy; partnership agreement (values, governance, roles, decision rules, conflict resolution); capacity and performance assessment; partnership-strengthening strategy |
| 2. Shared Understanding | Boundary map; context analysis of history, state and trends; future scenarios; agreed assessment of challenges and opportunities |
| 3. Vision and Planning | Shared vision spanning a generation or more; strategy with measurable, spatially explicit targets; action plan (two to five years, adjusted every six to twelve months); landscape finance strategy |
| 4. Taking Action | Action plan tracker; communications strategy; landscape narratives; landscape investment portfolio |
| 5. Impact and Learning | Impact analysis against agreed indicators, with baselines repeated every three to five years; reflection and learning summaries |
The guide holds that any partnership using only locally available resources can carry out every element, with land and resource users leading and owning the process. It treats shared understanding as something the partners generate together, noting that expert analyses alone “rarely provide a sufficient foundation” for agreement. It names the landscape investment portfolio as a centerpiece of implementation: a map or table of the public, private and civic projects that serve the plan, split into asset investments (agroforestry, riverbank restoration, green enterprise, clinics) and enabling investments (partnership operations, training, data, policy work, certification or payment for ecosystem services schemes). A Tool Guide drawn from more than 300 tools and 1000L’s open-access Terraso platform support the process.
4 Returns
Commonland’s 4 Returns framework, developed by Willem Ferwerda from 2012, names the outcomes a landscape should deliver within one generation: a return of inspiration, a social return (human well-being), a natural return (healthy nature) and a financial return (a regenerative economy). It pairs them with the three zones and a twenty-year horizon. The 1000L shared vision builds on the same four returns and five elements.
What the evidence shows
Regional reviews for the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature initiative documented more than 450 integrated landscape initiatives between 2013 and 2017 across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Europe [IC]. Metabolic’s 2026 assessment of the BioHub field documented 152 initiatives across 44 countries [TBV], an overlapping population seen through a bioregional vocabulary.
Rigorous evidence of whole-landscape outcomes remains thin [IC]. Reed et al. (2017) reviewed the tropical literature and did not find a single applied example that demonstrated, with reliable and in-depth data, the effective balancing of social and environmental trade-offs. Their assessment of 150 grey-literature cases and 24 peer-reviewed studies did show potential gains in social capital, income, employment and resource conservation, and it associated multi-level or polycentric governance with success. Scherr et al. (2026) cite newer comparative evidence, including a survey of 104 Latin American and Caribbean initiatives in which the more integrated ones performed better on agriculture, conservation, livelihoods and coordination [TBV]. They describe the evidence base as “fragmented, localized, and often anecdotal”, argue that ILM responds to documented failures of sectoral planning, and treat measurement as a tool for adaptive management.
The same review lists the failure modes practitioners report: capture of the partnership by private actors or by government; powerful stakeholders who stay outside and keep shaping land use; “performative planning”, where local people are heard and their ideas are not acted on; “exploitative planning”, where they are involved in planning and excluded from implementation; and problems of legitimacy, violence and corruption.
The support system after 25 years
Scherr et al. (2026) assessed the institutions that support ILM across 20 dimensions in five sub-systems (landscape partnerships; support programs; knowledge and tools; economics, business and finance; public policy). Only programs that develop partnerships showed extensive experimentation plus coordinated redesign. Ten dimensions showed widespread experimentation with little redesign. Nine showed minimal experimentation: long-term operational funding for partnerships, coordinated support services, data systems, impact assessment, an organized research community, valuation methods, financial flows to landscape action plans, government policy, and tenure.
The findings on money are the sharpest. The authors call the lack of sustained “process” funding for coordination, facilitation, governance and monitoring “an acute bottleneck”, and note that community-based and Indigenous organizations are often excluded from funding streams that favor large international NGOs. Most finance still flows through fragmented single-sector projects. Partnerships often lack legal status and investment readiness, and financiers have few tools for evaluating place-based, multi-stakeholder opportunities. In most countries, the authors find, current policy has a neutral or negative effect on ILM.
Among emerging responses the review names landscape bonds, blended-finance platforms, bioregional financing facilities (citing the BioFi work), and 1000L’s Landscape Finance Accelerator, which bundles partnership projects into investable portfolios.
The research side is organizing too. In April 2026 CABI launched CABI Multifunctional Landscapes, a gold open-access journal on integrated landscape research and practice, with 1000L as its primary partner and Scherr as editor-in-chief [IC]. It invites case studies and reflections on initiatives that did not succeed alongside research articles, and its table-of-contents feed is the place to follow new work in the field.
ILM and the BioConomy
This section is the wiki’s own reading. It follows from the structure of the two bodies of work and goes beyond what the ILM sources state.
ILM and the BioConomy work on the same unit, a living landscape and the people who depend on it, and start from the same diagnosis: sectoral institutions cannot hold a landscape’s interdependencies. They specify different layers. The ILM process specifies how the parties in a place agree on the state of their landscape and a plan for it. The BioConomy specifies how carrying out that plan earns contracted revenue that stays in the place, through the BioStack, the BioHub, bioregional finance and a bioregional currency.
| Function (Scherr et al. dimension or 1000L output) | What the ILM sources report | BioConomy component for the same function |
|---|---|---|
| Operational funding for the partnership | Coordination runs on short grants | Regenerative Participation Income for coordination roles; the Bioregional Trust in the Bioregional Financing Facility |
| Financial flows to the action plan | Finance stays sectoral and short-term; little reaches partnerships | The Bioregional Financing Facility’s four entities; performance-based bonds paying on verified outcomes |
| Legal standing and investment readiness | Most partnerships lack legal status | The stacked entity structure; the Bankable Service Alignment Template |
| Landscape investment portfolio | Projects presented to funders | The tenderable services portfolio, published through a coordination surface |
| Valuation | Methods exist and are rarely used | Retention logic; biome-specific water retention evidence priced against avoided infrastructure cost |
| Tenure | Little analysis; innovations stay informal | Commons trusts in Pathway A of the Five Transvestment Pathways |
What ILM offers a BioHub
The five elements give a BioHub cohort a tested sequence for the convening its own templates assume has happened. The shared-understanding outputs are the evidence base a cohort draws on when it runs the BioRegion Establishment Template. The ILM literature on facilitating across power differences, including guidance on bringing youth, women, Indigenous peoples and the economically disadvantaged into decisions, addresses risks a BioHub faces in the same form. Its intervention research on agroecology, habitat connectivity, watersheds and infrastructure design supplies the biome-specific evidence that turns restoration into a verifiable service.
Where the two differ
The ILM sources describe finance strategies that work inside the prevailing monetary and legal system: development bank funding, landscape investment funds, blended finance, aligned public budgets and corporate supply-chain investment. The Bioregional Financing Facility page draws the same line between institutional adaptation and a change of monetary substrate. Under the wiki’s Cheapest Available Behavior Thesis [MS], members of an arrangement who still earn and borrow in the conventional unit tend toward the behaviors that unit makes cheap, and the TIME framework reads such an arrangement as triform coordination with an Emergent overlay. The wiki reads the review’s pattern (25 years of partnership formation and method development, with financial flows, valuation and policy still rated minimal) as consistent with that thesis. The review’s authors explain the same pattern through institutional design, short funding cycles, siloed ministries and unfamiliarity with partnerships.
A second difference is posture. The 1000L guide frames the investment portfolio as a way to “attract finance and investment” to the landscape’s projects. The BioConomy frames restored-landscape outputs as services tendered into markets already structured to buy them, the distinction the glossary names needed versus needy. One portfolio can carry both: enabling investments that remain grant-funded, and services that can be contracted.
In practice the two fit together. A BioHub can use the five elements as its process spine, and an existing landscape partnership can use the BioConomy’s templates and instruments as a finance and coordination layer for the parts of its plan that produce contractable services.
Right of reply. This page describes the published work of 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People, EcoAgriculture Partners, Commonland and the authors cited. None of them has yet replied to the reading in this section.
Related
- Landscape Partnership (glossary)
- Integrated Landscape Management (glossary)
- The Bioregional Financing Facility
- Water Retention Landscapes
- Bioregional Economics
- The Cheapest Available Behavior Thesis
- What Is a BioHub
- Sara J. Scherr
- Willem Ferwerda
Sources
- 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People (2022). A Practical Guide to Integrated Landscape Management
- Scherr, S.J., et al. (2026). Collaborative Landscape and Bioregional Planning and Management
- Scherr, S.J., et al. (2026). A home for integrated landscape research and practice
- Sayer, J., et al. (2013). Ten principles for a landscape approach
- Reed, J., et al. (2017). Have integrated landscape approaches reconciled societal and environmental issues in the tropics?
- Dudley, N., et al. (2021). The 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration
- Power, S., Seefeld, L., et al. (2024). Bioregional Financing Facilities
- Gladek, E., et al. (2026). BioHubs: A Pathway to Regional Resilience
Provenance
Written 29 September 2026 from the 1000L Practical Guide to Integrated Landscape Management (2022), Scherr et al. (2026) in Land 15(2):307, CABI’s launch announcement for CABI Multifunctional Landscapes, the landscapes.global site, and the abstract of Reed et al. (2017). The CABI table-of-contents feed could not be read by the tools used, so no journal articles beyond the launch editorial are cited. Counts that the ILM coalitions report about themselves are tagged [TBV]. The section “ILM and the BioConomy” is the wiki author’s structural inference, set apart from the reported framework; the page as a whole carries documented-framework.