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The governance of land use strategies: Institutional and social dimensions of land sparing and land sharing.

ABSTRACT: Agricultural land use is a key interface between the goals of ensuring food security and protecting biodiversity. "Land sparing" supports intensive agriculture to save land for conservation, whereas "land sharing" integrates production and conservation on the same land. The framing around sparing versus sharing has been extensively debated. Here, we focused on a frequently missing yet crucial component, namely the governance dimension. Through a case-study in Ethiopia, we uncovered stakeholder preferences for sparing versus sharing, the underlying rationale, and implementation capacity challenges. Policy stakeholders preferred sparing whereas implementation stakeholders preferred sharing, which aligned with existing informal institutions. Implementation of both strategies was limited by social, biophysical, and institutional factors. Land use policies need to account for both ecological patterns and social context. The findings from simple analytical frameworks (e.g., sparing vs. sharing) therefore need to be interpreted carefully, and in a social-ecological context, to generate meaningful recommendations for conservation practice.

SUBMITTER: Jiren TS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6049885 | biostudies-other | 2018 May-Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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The governance of land use strategies: Institutional and social dimensions of land sparing and land sharing.

Jiren Tolera S TS Dorresteijn Ine I Schultner Jannik J Fischer Joern J

Conservation letters 20171213 3

Agricultural land use is a key interface between the goals of ensuring food security and protecting biodiversity. "Land sparing" supports intensive agriculture to save land for conservation, whereas "land sharing" integrates production and conservation on the same land. The framing around sparing versus sharing has been extensively debated. Here, we focused on a frequently missing yet crucial component, namely the governance dimension. Through a case-study in Ethiopia, we uncovered stakeholder p ...[more]

PMID: 30034527

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Project description:This study addresses the ongoing debate on forest land-sparing vs land-sharing, aiming to identify effective strategies for both species conservation and timber exploitation. Previous studies, guided by control theory, compared sharing and sparing by optimizing logging intensity along a presumed trade-off between timber yield and ecological outcomes. However, the realism of this trade-off assumption is questioned by ecological and governance theories. This article introduces a mathematical model of Social-Ecological System (SES) dynamics, distinguishing selective logging intensification between sharing and sparing, with associated governance requirements. The model assumes consistent rules for logging, replanting, conservation support, access regulation, socio-economic, soil and climate conditions. Actors, each specialized in sustainable logging and replanting of a single species, coexist with various tree species in the same space for land sharing, contrasting with separate actions on monospecific stands for sparing. In sharing scenarios, a gradient of intensification is created from 256 combinations of selective logging for a forest with eight coexisting tree species. This is compared with eight scenarios of monospecific stands adjacent to a spared eight-species forest area safeguarded from logging. Numerical projections over 100 years rank sparing and sharing options based on forest-level tree biodiversity, carbon storage, and timber yield. The findings underscore the context-specific nature of the problem but identify simple heuristics to optimize both sparing and sharing practices. Prioritizing the most productive tree species is effective when selecting sparing, especially when timber yield and biodiversity are benchmarks. Conversely, sharing consistently outperforms sparing when carbon storage and biodiversity are main criteria. Sharing excels across scenarios considering all three criteria, provided a greater diversity of actors access and coexist in the shared space under collective rules ensuring independence and sustainable logging and replanting. The present model addresses some limitations in existing sparing-sharing theory by aligning with established ecological theories exploring the intricate relationship between disturbance practices, productivity and ecological outcomes. The findings also support a governance hypothesis from the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (E. Ostrom) regarding the positive impact on biodiversity and productivity of increasing polycentricity, i.e., expanding the number of independent species controllers' channels (loggers/replanters/supporters/regulators). This hypothesis, rooted in Ashby's law of requisite variety from control theory, suggests that resolving the sharing/sparing dilemma may depend on our ability to predict the yield-ecology performances of sparing (in heterogeneous landscapes) vs of sharing (in the same space) from their respective levels of "polycentric requisite variety".

Project description:Reconciling the aims of feeding an ever more demanding human population and conserving biodiversity is a difficult challenge. Here, we explore potential solutions by assessing whether land sparing (farming for high yield, potentially enabling the protection of non-farmland habitat), land sharing (lower yielding farming with more biodiversity within farmland) or a mixed strategy would result in better bird conservation outcomes for a specified level of agricultural production. We surveyed forest and farmland study areas in southern Uganda, measuring the population density of 256 bird species and agricultural yield: food energy and gross income. Parametric non-linear functions relating density to yield were fitted. Species were identified as "winners" (total population size always at least as great with agriculture present as without it) or "losers" (total population sometimes or always reduced with agriculture present) for a range of targets for total agricultural production. For each target we determined whether each species would be predicted to have a higher total population with land sparing, land sharing or with any intermediate level of sparing at an intermediate yield. We found that most species were expected to have their highest total populations with land sparing, particularly loser species and species with small global range sizes. Hence, more species would benefit from high-yield farming if used as part of a strategy to reduce forest loss than from low-yield farming and land sharing, as has been found in Ghana and India in a previous study. We caution against advocacy for high-yield farming alone as a means to deliver land sparing if it is done without strong protection for natural habitats, other ecosystem services and social welfare. Instead, we suggest that conservationists explore how conservation and agricultural policies can be better integrated to deliver land sparing by, for example, combining land-use planning and agronomic support for small farmers.

Dataset Information

The governance of land use strategies: Institutional and social dimensions of land sparing and land sharing.

Publications

The governance of land use strategies: Institutional and social dimensions of land sparing and land sharing.

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