Synthesis, part of a special feature on Learning from Doing: Closing Knowledge Gaps in Integrated Landscape Research

INTRODUCTION

There is increasing policy engagement toward achieving sustainable landscapes worldwide to tackle the current global biodiversity, climate, and environmental crises (Arts et al. 2017), and to achieve global targets as defined in the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations 2015a), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (Convention on Biological Diversity 2022), and the Paris Climate Agreement (United Nations 2015b). In the frame of these policy processes, landscapes can be conceptualized as interdependent human and natural systems that can provide multiple contributions to the needs and quality of life of a diversity of people (Wu 2021). Interdependent human and natural systems are characterized not only by an inherent ecological complexity, but also by people’s diversity of worldviews, knowledge, needs and interests, values and decision making powers, imposing trade-offs in decisions and challenges for governance, use, and management (Ellis et al. 2019).

Integrated landscape approaches (ILAs) offer important concepts and practices to deal with the complexity and diversity of interconnected natural and human systems (Carmenta et al. 2020). ILAs are understood as “governance strategies that attempt to reconcile multiple and conflicting land-use claims to harmonize the needs of people and the environment and establish more sustainable and equitable multi-functional landscapes” (Reed et al. 2020a). This definition broadly recognizes that people’s engagement, institutional and political support, and good governance are critical for the success of landscape approaches (Reed et al. 2017). It also conceptually emphasizes the centrality of political dimensions of landscapes, such as governance, conflicts, and people’s needs. The focus on the political dimensions frames landscapes as contested territories, shaped among others by social-ecological interactions and relations, everyday practices, and local customary rules and norms (Wylie 2007). It can reveal underlying injustices encoded in the territory (Olwig 2019) that may be the root of tenure and other land-use conflicts. There might be diverse demands, preferences, and expectations regarding future land-use, management, and functions (Olwig and Mitchell 2009). It is therefore necessary to identify and navigate disagreements that emerge from different legitimate worldviews, values, and interests over the land (Mitchell 2023), promoting public participation and inclusive actor engagement, while accounting for power asymmetries between actors and allowing for dissent (Schlosberg 1999, Matulis and Moyer 2017, Cortés-Capano et al. 2022).

Despite the call for equitable multi-functional landscapes in ILAs and important efforts to advance research that deals with land-related conflicts, ILAs have rarely paid nuanced attention to injustices that manifest in landscape use, management, and governance (Meyfroidt et al. 2022). We aim to contribute to this research gap and provide inspirational and useful conceptual understandings and methodological approaches to make injustice more explicit in the science and practice of ILAs. In this synthesis, we illustrate how ILAs relate to multiple dimensions of justice and identify the injustices that can appear in, and shape, a given landscape. We provide examples of how injustices may be methodologically appraised, from an academic perspective. Finally, we share our own experiences of struggling with injustices in the landscapes where we work. We conclude suggesting some ways forward toward a research and practice of ILAs that can identify, assess, and contribute to address injustices.

INJUSTICES MANIFESTED IN LANDSCAPES

In the last 40 years, there has been an evolution of justice conceptualizations and methodologies (see Walker 2009, Agyeman et al. 2016), according to the need for understanding and studying different forms of injustices, related to a wide variety of issues (environmental but also climate or nature conservation), and happening at several scales in the landscape. Interest for landscape justice has appeared generally in land-system research in relation to environmental governance (Landauer et al. 2023), land use planning (Anguelovski et al. 2016, Venier-Cambron et al. 2024), and in relation to telecoupling or distant interactions in land-systems (Corbera et al. 2019). People’s right to landscape has also received attention in landscape planning, i.e., what kind of human rights are at stake and at risk when actors plan and make decisions in a given landscape (Wensing 2013). Justice and the view of landscapes as political and contested territory is critical, however, in the work of environmental justice, landscape architecture, and geography scholars (Mels 2023). Notably, it is essential to understand landscapes as relational places, defined by human-environment interactions and relations, and that these relations and interactions frame possibilities and challenges in stewardship and public participation in landscape governance (Stenseke 2018) or describe social struggle among multiple landscape claims (Setten et al. 2018). This vision has also been integrated in policy, for instance in the Council of Europe’s Landscape Convention definition of landscape, as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (COE 2000).

Justice refers to removing the systemic barriers that cause disparities in a given reality (Friedman et al. 2018, Wijsman and Berbés-Blázquez 2022). Specifically, landscape justice can be understood as people’s capacity to decide about, access, use, and manage a landscape in all its dimensions (land tenure, livelihoods, natural resources, culture and identity, etc.) that are critical to their survival and quality of life, i.e., to achieve and live the kind of life that each person values (Nussbaum 2002, Olwig 2022). In this context, quality of life refers to the multidimensional and plural opportunities for people to flourish and fully participate in their chosen form of life (Doyal and Gough 1984), while at the same time, it is constrained by the ecological capacity of the landscape (Brand et al. 2021). This conceptualization of quality of life also broadens to the inclusion of more-than-human beings, recognizing the multiplicity of nature-human interactions ultimately shaping landscapes (Tschakert et al. 2021, Kortetmäki et al. 2023).

Injustices can manifest across scale and places (e.g., contextual), and across time (e.g., restorative and intergenerational). Injustices can happen in a specific place (e.g., intragenerational such as distributional, procedural, and recognition; multispecies) and they can also be closely linked to worldviews, knowledge, values, relations, and interactions in decision processes (e.g., epistemic; Fig. 1). Identifying, understanding, and addressing these injustices could make it possible to reconcile multiple and conflicting uses, to tackle unsustainable management practices, and to foster decision processes that harmonize the needs of diverse people and other species.

Below, we use case examples to illustrate and explain the injustices that can happen in a landscape, and also suggest potential ways forward for ILAs addressing them. To do so, we selected a number of examples that originated from our place-based research, in landscapes where we work or we have worked, as a diverse group of social-ecological researchers. Thus, this synthesis does not stem from a systematic or comprehensive literature review. Rather, the collection of case examples emerges from a deliberative process of three months of lively discussion, conversations and targeted seminars about justice in landscape research by the co-authors. Additional illustrative examples found in the literature are in Appendix 1.

Restorative injustice

Current landscapes represent the social-ecological dynamics that have evolved over time, often spanning centuries. Acknowledging the history of social trauma within a landscape (e.g., colonization, war, slavery) and taking actions toward recovery is the focus of restorative justice (Aragão et al. 2016).

One example is bison restoration in North America. North American bison, also commonly referred to as buffalo in the English language by local Indigenous societies, were driven to near extinction in the 19th century as a form of colonial oppression (Hubbard 2016). The buffalo is a cultural and ecological keystone species for many North American Plains place-based societies and the animal is intricately intertwined within Indigenous paradigms (Crosschild et al. 2021).

The Buffalo Treaty (https://www.buffalotreaty.com/), first signed in 2014, is a treaty between sovereign primarily Indigenous nations and buffalo themselves (as possessing personhood; e.g., Deckha 2020), with the binding commitment to restore bison physically across the landscape as well as “buffalo consciousness” within North American societies (Crosschild et al. 2021). Treaty-making was (and continues to be) a method of governance between Indigenous–Indigenous nations long before colonial powers arrived in North America (Crosschild et al. 2021). In addition, treaty-making has been practiced between Indigenous–non-Indigenous groups, whether to assert colonial order (e.g., Numbered Treaties in Canada; Manore 2010, Starblanket 2019) or with the aim to restore historical injustices (e.g., modern treaties; Hobbs and Young 2021) since colonial settlement. Modern treaties are co-developed by Indigenous–non-Indigenous nations and have been shown to empower Indigenous People to exercise and protect (some of) their rights, such as rights of access to sacred spaces (Robinson 2020). The Buffalo Treaty is special because through its very existence it restores Indigenous–Indigenous treaty-making practices (Crosschild et al. 2021), while also extending a hand to non-Indigenous parties as signatories. This example shows that Indigenous treaty-making can potentially pave a new way for restoring environmental and human rights injustices in North America.

Epistemic injustice

Epistemic injustice may take the form of marginalized local knowledge (Cummings et al. 2023) and lead to disputes among powerful and less powerful actors on what knowledge is considered credible, salient, and legitimate. Following the previous case example, not only were buffalo (in some cultures seen as teachers and kin) removed from the land, but youth were forcibly removed from the landscape to attend residential schools (de Leeuw 2009). The Buffalo Treaty can rebalance epistemologies of natural resource and land management (Crosschild et al. 2021, Shamon et al. 2022). Returning buffalo to the landscape is one step in reinstating the animal as a teacher from whom to learn (Hubbard 2016). Furthermore, the (re-)teaching of buffalo stories and culture and (re-)enacting “buffalo consciousness” across the North American Plains is the groundwork for developing a symbiotic relationship between humans and buffalo (Hubbard 2016). This exercise of epistemic justice can further meet the needs of humans (Shamon et al. 2022), local ecosystems (Tielkes and Altmann 2021), and other species (Deckha 2020).

Multispecies injustice

Multispecies justice seeks to understand the types of relationships humans ought to cultivate with more-than-human beings to produce just landscapes (Celermajer et al. 2021). Multispecies justice challenges the misconceptions that humans are separable from other species and inherently more important because they are sentient beings (Srinivasan and Kasturirangan 2016). It prompts rethinking of the complex web of interactions, interdependencies, and rights of existence for the thriving of all species, including subspecies that shape and depend on the landscape. This perspective opens debates on what is sustainable management and use in relation to other species, and about whose voices are being heard and who is invited into the decision-making process, as well as recognizing the traditional relationships between non-human beings and humans (Pineda-Pinto et al. 2023). It also acknowledges the interspecies relationships between humans, animals, and plants (Bracke et al. 2023).

We can find one example of multispecies injustice within the frame of just food systems and landscape stewardship, in the broken millennial relationship of care between humans and the maize plant in Mesoamerica. Maize is more than a crop; it is embedded in cultural, ecological; and spiritual landscapes (Benrey et al. 2024). The sacred value of this domesticated crop in many Indigenous cultures in Mesoamerica, where people believe that their flesh is made of maize (“hombre del maíz” in Mexico), exemplifies their deep relationship and helps conserve local maize adapted to specific environments and to foster practices that allow for its sustainable management focused on respect and care. The traditional milpa system, of which maize is the central element, exemplifies as well the reciprocal relationships between humans, plants, and animals. By maintaining biodiversity through intercropping maize, beans, squash, chili, and many other species, the traditional milpa system fosters resilience and enhances contributions to people, such as the conservation of genetic diversity and pollination (Romero-Natale et al. 2024). In places where this relationship does not exist, the use of local maize adapted to local conditions and human needs is often marginalized and limited, and maize is intensively produced, leading to loss of traditional milpa landscapes and to an unjust and unsustainable use of land and management practices (Zimmerer 2014). As a form of resistance to pressures to intensify production and the promotion of commercial maize varieties, farmers in many places among Mesoamerica continue to conserve their own local varieties rather than completely neglecting them, while also integrating modern varieties, if considered suitable (Perales et al. 2003).

Contextual injustice

The broader current political, economic, social, and cultural structural context within a landscape that generally prevents people’s ability to fulfil their needs and gain quality of life is known as contextual injustice (McDermott et al. 2013). It is noticeable, for instance, in landscape structures that prevent already marginalized people from accessing or using natural resources and from participating in decision making about their management.

One example is the traditional water harvesting system in rural India (Chowdhury and Behera 2021). Community water tanks are managed by local informal institutions and committees, where most of the committee members come from historically privileged and politically powerful individuals or families. In the current economic situation, where increasing food demand driven by rapid urbanization is prevalent, committee members decided to adopt market-based or commercial aquaculture in many community water bodies. This shift aimed to maximize revenue and profit from the water resource. As a result, committees restricted the use of water for irrigation by the villagers. This restriction limited access to water for most of the villagers, effectively subordinating the needs of the many to the economic interests of the few (Sanabria-Rangel 2023). Limited access to water made villagers dependent on groundwater markets, mostly controlled by village elites who often set the price of water. Villagers have a very limited ability to fulfil their water needs within the current management and decision-making framework of the landscape where access to water is controlled by the powerful members and local elites. Furthermore, achieving sustainable water use and harmonizing the needs of several groups of people is undermined by illegal encroachment and corruption, compounding the challenges faced by the community. As another example, gender inequality in climate change adaptation and mitigation further exacerbates climate injustice in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh. Despite the global emphasis on gender equality, traditional gender norms often obscure women’s roles, capacities, and experiences in coping with climate change, for example, excluding them from decision-making processes that affect their livelihoods (Castelo et al. 2024). Addressing contextual injustice is difficult because it entails fundamental changes in the structure and organization of the landscape in addition to, for example, changes in water governance, use, and management; or in addition to actions to promote capacities of women to adapt to climate change.

Contextual justice also accounts for cross-scale and cross-place injustices. For example, international mitigation strategies designed to combat global climate change can have substantial local impacts, highlighting how global policies can affect local contexts unevenly (Boillat et al. 2020). Climate change and resource scarcity are increasingly perceived as exacerbating existing societal problems such as poverty, social insecurity, violence, terrorism, and civil war (Froese and Schilling 2019, Lèbre et al. 2020). Recent shifts in the mineral sector driven by global climate change policies have resulted in a decline in thermal coal production in some places, while increasing the extraction of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel in others. These minerals are essential for green technologies such as wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, and electric vehicle motors. A complete phase-out of coal is estimated to affect a minimum of 33.5 million people, with an additional 115.7 million impacted if all critical minerals projects enter production (Svobodova et al. 2021). As mining companies search for new resources in environmentally and socially sensitive areas, often inhabited by Indigenous peoples or ethnic minorities, they frequently operate in contexts where there are already significant imbalances in political, economic, and cultural power (Lèbre et al. 2020, Kung et al. 2021, Owen et al. 2023). In Australia, disadvantaged areas host the highest number of critical mineral mines and deposits (Burton et al. 2024). Similarly, in Africa, the global rush for critical minerals is producing significant social-ecological impacts (Boafo et al. 2024). Companies operating in these landscapes can face numerous challenges in integrating their activities in just landscapes, reconciling multiple uses and conflicting activities, such as ensuring that local people can raise concerns when their rights or interests are violated, or injustices occur to extreme or violent means from companies and other powerful actors.

Distributional injustice

Distributional justice refers to the fair distribution of benefits of nature’s contributions and burdens to several groups of people, as derived from a given decision (Loos et al. 2023). Such fair distribution depends among other things on the capacity of the biophysical landscape to generate contributions to people (Langemeyer et al. 2024). It is also associated with a culturally specific idea of tolerable and morally acceptable differences in society, and it emphasizes the need for society and people to agree on the sharing of benefits and burdens.

One example is landscapes producing geographic indication (GI) products such as pasture landscapes in Southwestern Europe. Market prices paid to milk producers are too low to support extensive herding practices or traditional manual labor for processing raw milk into cheese in Spain and Portugal. In such landscapes, primary producers profit the least from premium market prices of labelled products, compared to other actors in the value chain (Flinzberger et al. 2024). The power to bargain for higher prices primarily lies with resellers and final distributors (e.g., supermarkets, or delicatessen stores). To secure fair prices for their contributions to a sustainable landscape, which are not fully rewarded by the market, many primary producers rely on agricultural support programs. These programs should reward farmers for the social-ecological benefits provided by their extensive production systems. They exist in the form of payments for contractual nature conservation or as agri-environmental measures within the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU. Direct marketing through farm stores, joining cooperatives, or engaging in producer-marketing networks with no or flat hierarchies are sensible options as well for tackling distributional injustices. Producing GI products often require additional financial, intellectual, and time resources, but they are needed to maintain the current sustainable management of the landscape.

Procedural injustice

Procedural justice refers to how agreements about the distribution of benefits and burdens are made, encompassing both formal and informal arrangements. Transparency, accountability, access to mechanisms of justice for solving conflicts, and people’s capacity for effective participation in decision-making are essential for achieving it (Zafra-Calvo et al. 2017).

EU agri-environmental and climate measures (AECMs), a voluntary policy tool for farmers to improve the environmental condition of agricultural landscapes, have been criticized for suboptimal ecological effectiveness (Batáry et al. 2015) and for not sufficiently addressing farmers’ motivations (Brown et al. 2021). AECMs are usually implemented on the scale of a single farm, limiting the nature conservation benefits obtained at landscape scale (Pe’er et al. 2022; Le Provost et al. 2023). One new procedural approach to AECMs is the coordinated implementation of activities at landscape scale through cooperation of farmers (Westerink et al. 2017, Pe’er et al. 2022). On the one hand, farmers fear an increase in burdens through cooperative AECMs, such as required coordination effort with other farmers, reduced flexibility due to agreement processes, rising dependence from cooperating parties, and growing conflicts. On the other hand, they also expect an increase in benefits, such as more flexibility in the management of AECMs and reduced administrative effort through task-sharing (Huber et al. 2025). Full engagement of farmers and the possibility to achieve procedural justice through collective decision processes are critical. How processes of cooperation are designed and how procedural justice is approached, may thus hamper or promote sustainable agricultural management.

Recognition injustice

Recognition justice entails the recognition of all people who could have a say in decision-making processes, and the acknowledgement and respect for their views and values, cultural identities, customary rights, understandings and practices of management and traditional knowledge (Martin et al. 2016). Recognition also refers to the respect of identity and social and cultural differences in society. Recognizing the societal customs and land-use systems of multiple people (including minority and Indigenous groups) is essential for landscape justice.

Recognition injustice can be illustrated with reference to the Chin people, who have inhabited the “peripheral” uplands of Myanmar for centuries. Subsistence farming remains a livelihood pillar in most rural Chin communities (Kmoch et al. 2018), where farmers engage in a traditional land management strategy known as “swidden farming.” Swiddening entails a land-use sequence of growing annual crops such as maize, rice, or beans for several years, followed by an extended period of low-intensity use, during which trees and shrubby vegetation are intentionally left to regrow. Eventually, these plants are cut and their remains burned, to initiate a new swidden cycle. Customary rules traditionally governed this land-use system (Aung 2019, Kmoch et al. 2021). By custom, land was controlled by the village community, and land sales to outsiders were prevented. Conflict arose when Myanmar’s government sought to attract investments, and to seize greater control over farmers’ swidden land during the pre-coup transition period (Bastos Lima and Kmoch 2021). A series of strategic land-law changes failed to recognize the intricate cultural practices that underpin traditional swidden systems, in knowing disrespect of communities’ customary land-rights. Much land in ethnic rural regions was declared “vacant, fallow, or virgin,” and thus allegedly open for land concessions (Namati 2019). The Chin risked being criminalized if they failed to obtain land-use permits at short notice, or to lose their customary inherited land altogether, if they acquired land-use permits under the new national law, which need to be changed to address recognition justice.

Intergenerational injustice

Intergenerational injustice refers to current changes in policies, uses, and management practices, which may generate changes in the territory, such as prohibition of certain uses or traditional management practices that may affect future generations’ capacity to get what they will need (food, water, recreation) from the landscape (Rockström et al. 2023).

In Morogoro and Dodoma regions (Tanzania), young smallholder farmers often lament the current exploitation of forest and land resources by the elderly. It reduces the forest cover and it fragments land, thereby limiting the access to benefits from forest to future generations. Similarly, ongoing economic development and population growth in these regions has led to competition in land-use types (e.g., built-up land vs. farming land) and degradation of soil fertility, water quality and quantity, which often decreases land-based livelihood, threatening future generations’ opportunities to maintain their traditions and cultures (Armstrong 2012). Addressing intergenerational injustice entails present-day conversations, discussions, negotiations, and actions that can navigate and accommodate differences in how the future of the landscape or land is envisioned.

METHODS TO UNDERSTAND LANDSCAPE INJUSTICES

Although there is a wide collection of approaches, methods, and tools to apply and implement ILAs (Reed et al. 2020b, Waeber et al. 2023), understanding injustice in ILAs faces a gap between theory and practice. There is a large body of approaches and methods that can enhance our understanding of injustices happening in a landscape (Kinnebrew et al. 2021), and these can be used as initial steps for tackling the theory-practice gap and advance justice in ILAs.

Basic methods, such as stakeholder analysis, can allow the identification of the different actors that can participate and be engaged in research and/or in deciding/acting over an issue at stake in the landscape (Reed et al. 2009). Household surveys or in-depth semi-structured interviews are commonly employed for eliciting the plurality of people’s beliefs, knowledge, and values (Young et al. 2018). Policy analyses can also be helpful to recall rights (McLain et al. 2021). Besides identifying rights, beliefs, and values, it is essential to understand the diversity of mental models (Topp et al. 2024) that people hold, and how they shape their conceptualization of a landscape challenge, particularly engaging marginalized voices in expressing their perspectives and experiences about the challenge. This last can be done through photovoice, a tool that combines photography and dialogue, supporting people in reflective processes about their landscape concerns and priorities (Huber et al. 2023).

Participatory spatial tools can be broadly used to understand how to achieve higher inclusivity in decisions (see details in Ros-Tonen and Willemen 2021). Specifically, when participatory reflective processes are assisted by physical maps (e.g., participatory mapping) or digital geographic information systems (e.g., Public Participation Geographic Information Systems, PPGIS), it can bring local knowledge about the landscape into geographic information systems (Svobodova et al. 2021), which can assist planning in the landscape (Polas et al. 2024) and negotiation of land-uses allocation trade-offs (Asubonteng et al. 2021), in places where it is critical to reconcile multiple uses or conflicting activities.

Understanding the collective experiences and relations with the landscape of people affected by land-policies through narratives and storytelling (Fraser 2004) can also support tailored and more just decisions about land-use planning (Ameel 2020, Davis 2022, Woodhouse et al. 2022). To understand how people make sense of complex relations and landscape dynamics and how this frames their reality, the diversity of discourses and collective imaginaries happening in the landscape can be analyzed by semi-quantitative methods such as Q-methodology (see details in Ros-Tonen et al. 2024). Especially important here is paying attention to the network and power dynamics between actors in the landscape, which may determine their capacity to influence decision-making processes and whose vision, values, knowledge, and perceptions are reflected in the result (Siangulube 2024). Power dynamics that are inherently created in decisions about planning, use, or management can be balanced by Delphi approaches (Escribano et al. 2018) or by designing games collectively in a process based on joy and creativity (Lankford and Craven 2020). Research about games has shown that having good quality and positive interactions with others in decision processes facilitates the sustainable use and management of natural resources, for instance, water (Brugnach et al. 2021).

Arts-based methods, such as poetic inquiry, can contribute to understanding the connections, emotions, and relational values embedded in landscapes (Heindorf et al. 2024). Participatory monitoring and evaluation (Andrianandrasana et al. 2022), where people decide what to monitor and how, can also be useful to appreciate how people understand and categorize the world around them, for instance in approaches such as the folk classification that allows us to know how Indigenous people classify plants, ecosystems, and land-uses (Riu-Bosoms et al. 2015, Heindorf et al. 2021). In this sense, transdisciplinary relational thinking techniques (Max-Neef 2005, Bird-David and Naveh 2008) and application of methods outside the Western research toolbox are also essential to include Indigenous knowledge in decisions about the use and management of the land or species.

With several approaches, methods, and tools available, it is important to gain an overview of not only the options, but the main advantages and disadvantages of the application of each of them. The most appropriate to use in each case depends on the aim of the research, available resources, and social-ecological characteristics of a given landscape. The diversity of situations in which several approaches, methods, and tools can be applied require flexibility and creativity (Torralba et al. 2022). Appendix 2 provides a detailed overview of approaches, methods, and tools that may be used to study each of the injustices manifested in ILAs, their usefulness and limitations. These methods can be combined and integrated in their application as needed. Making injustices visible is the first step in opening the door to tackle them.

INDIVIDUAL STRUGGLES AND THE ROLE OF REFLEXIVITY IN ADDRESSING INJUSTICE IN LANDSCAPE RESEARCH

Place-based research in landscapes where injustices are clearly manifested entails a challenge to researchers. They need to decide how to relate and position themselves within the situation at hand and whether they engage with more transgressive science (i.e., “science that entails a deeper reflection on our roles as scientists and exploration of alternative engaged, post-normal and activist approaches to research,” see Temper et al. 2019), or open activism, in the places they work. Although attempting to address injustices (or not) in the landscape where researchers work is indeed a personal decision, it is commonly useful being aware of researchers’ own positionality in the research they do, in relation to the place they work and the people they interact with and relate to. The positions and roles adopted by researchers influence the ways in which research problems are framed, the components and boundaries of these problems, and the constraints and opportunities to address them (Bilgen et al. 2021).

Acknowledging that researchers’ positionalities are complex and dynamic highlights the importance of awareness and reflexivity as a critical practice in our research (Glover 2024). The most common use of the notion of reflexivity refers to the capacity of researchers to critically examine their identities, concerns, emotions, and practices and how they influence their research (Pienkowski et al. 2023). In this sense, reflexivity not only involves questioning researchers’ assumptions of their own positions but also how they are perceived by other participants, and how this impacts on research processes, navigating the tensions involved with researchers’ multiple roles, being both collaborative participants in the study systems, and critical observers (Bartels and Wittmayer 2018, Soedirgo and Glas 2020). Overall, recognizing that researchers always intervene and play a role in the landscapes they study has ethical implications in terms of their responsibilities and accountability regarding the consequences of their actions (and omissions) on the participants’ lives. Researchers of ILAs in place-based settings may face challenging situations regarding their role and the explicit or implicit expectations held by multiple actors, as well as funders and research agencies (Caniglia et al. 2023). Engaging in a reflective research practice entails considering our own positionality, but also the employed methodologies, in order to identify potentially extractives methodological approaches, as well as potentially useful concepts or tools that are easily accessible to not only researchers, but also the researched individuals, and communities at large (Waeber et al. 2023).

Positionality statements where researchers articulate how their race, ethnicity, social class, and gender may influence the ways they conduct their research are becoming increasingly common when publishing empirical studies. Although not exempt from exposing researchers’ vulnerability (Massoud 2022), positionality statements have contributed to increasing transparency regarding possible bias and the potential influence of personal characteristics on research processes (Holmes 2020) and outcomes. Examples of questions to start reflexivity processes in research can be found in Jamieson et al. (2023) and Hill et al. (2024). Here, we share the personal journey and struggles of four of the co-authors of this synthesis about how the science we make can contribute to or reinforce injustices in the landscape (Box 1 and Appendix 3). The texts do not aim to be comprehensive accounts of the individual and collective reflexivity processes, but to provide different examples of ways, styles, and angles through which it can be possible to engage in reflexivity and report positionality in the research and practice of ILAs.

FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT JUSTICE IN ILAs

Governance is about who makes decisions and how decision-making processes take place (Andersson 2021). Justice has been recognized as a key aspect of good governance in an effective landscape approach (Reed et al. 2016). Our central argument is that justice is essential to the success of ILAs, as it is necessary to fully understand the guiding principles of ILAs (Scherr et al. 2013) and to put them into use. For instance, these principles refer to negotiating shared management objectives and employing collaborative processes that engage actors (such as in, e.g., agri-environmental and climate measures in Germany, procedural justice); contributing to supportive public policies (e.g., recognizing Chin people tenure rights in Myanmar, recognition justice) and markets (e.g., upholding food-landscape systems producing geographic indication products in Spain and Portugal, distributional justice; or addressing inequalities in mineral global markets, contextual justice); achieving practices that can follow multiple objectives (e.g., Buffalo Treaty in Canada, restorative and epistemic justice, or agricultural management close to care and multispecies justice); and promoting synergies and mitigating trade-offs (e.g., forest management that can fulfil the livelihood aspirations of teens and elders in Tanzania, intergenerational justice).

A commitment to enhancing justice is an ethical imperative to respect quality of life and safeguard the dignity and autonomy of all participants in ILA research and practice. Attention to justice can overcome the main challenges in implementing ILAs, which are also what is required for its success: actor engagement, interactions such as collaboration in participatory processes and governance structures, as well as adequate institutional arrangements and policies (Carmenta et al. 2020, Vermunt et al. 2020). In addition, relations and interactions happening in the landscape need to navigate differences, power asymmetries, and conflicts and avoid reinforcing existing exclusions and injustices (Loos et al. 2024). This requires creating the conditions for legitimate disagreement to be part of decision making in ILAs (Cortes-Capano et al. 2022).

Several types of injustices and power asymmetries can inevitably appear in landscape governance and shape decision processes and outputs when actors are engaged, and there are participatory structures in place and multi-level institutions that aim for policy change (Ros-Tonen et al. 2018, Meyfroidt et al. 2022). We identify one by one some of the injustices and actions to reinstate justice as a first step to support ILAs to achieve just and sustainable landscapes (Reed et al. 2020c). In this sense, it is rare to find a dimension of justice in isolation in a landscape. Initial attention to one of the potential injustices in a landscape can open the door to identify and have the opportunity to address several of them. For example, in the case regarding bison restoration, concerns to tackle restorative injustices through the Buffalo Treaty can also promote further engagement with epistemic, recognition, and multispecies injustices happening in the landscape (i.e., recognizing the knowledge and values of Indigenous people and the personhood of the buffalo). We encourage ILA researchers and practitioners to start studying one of the dimensions of justice and be open to digging in others as they can appear or be visible in the landscape.

One of the main challenges we face as place-based researchers is how to engage with several dimensions of injustice in global or remote analyses that aim to provide evidence to global or national policy processes and that can be far from what is happening in specific places. In that case, we suggest to scale up the analysis of injustice to the appropriate level of analysis (such as planetary level in Rockström et al. 2023). It is also important to keep in mind the significant limitations of global or remote analyses to inform local action and practice (Cash and Moser 2000, Wyborn and Evans 2021), as well as to address the further challenge of making decisions at global or national scales that rely on multi-scale data and a plurality of evidence (Chaplin-Kramer et al. 2022, Cole et al. 2023).

The combination of multiple scales of analysis and complex dynamics in human and natural systems presents problems for the conventional assessment of ILA effectiveness (Waeber et al. 2023). It has been argued that theory of change can help in overcoming these problems (Sayer et al. 2017, Reed et al. 2023, Reed et al. 2024). The approaches, methods, and tools suggested here are useful to understand injustices occurring in the landscape and advance justice, which can be incorporated in a more general theory of change framework to assess the effectiveness of ILAs. For instance, participatory processes, such as photovoice or participatory mapping, can support actor engagement, negotiation, connection to policy processes, and good governance. It is important in participatory research that researchers collecting, gathering, sharing, disseminating, and using data ensure that data is used fairly (Floridi and Taddeo 2016) and assess the foreseen consequences that research might bring about, aiming to enhance human and non-human quality of life (Martela 2015, Wienhues 2020).

We also invite researchers to increase their reflexivity, discussing explicitly and iteratively their identities, held values, and positions and how they might change along ILA research and implementation processes. We recognized the importance of reflexivity not only for researchers but for all actors engaged in the research and practice of ILAs. Mainstreaming collective processes of reflexivity can foster mutual learning about values, assumptions, and understandings (Popa and Guillermin 2017), enabling more just management. We conclude that iteratively understanding, assessing, reflecting, and acting on justice issues in landscapes should be considered an integral part of ILAs, contributing toward socially relevant and impactful research and practice.

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