Addressing the Polycrisis through Multi-Stakeholder Landscape Partnerships and the Rise of a Landscape Support System

In this seminar, Dr. Sara Scherr examines integrated landscape management (ILM) as a response to the ongoing polycrisis, arguing that it integrates healthy nature, regenerative economies, human well-being, and social solidarity in ways that empower local actors. Dr.Scherr finds that multi-stakeholder landscape partnerships have proliferated over recent decades, supported by growing knowledge, planning tools, and finance mechanisms that increasingly identify synergies and reduce trade-offs among landscape functions, yet these partnerships continue to face weak institutional capacity, inadequate long-term funding, fragmented support services, limited data and impact-assessment infrastructure, inadequate economic valuation methods, and sparse policy and tenure support from governments. Scherr argues that realizing the full transformative potential of ILM will require more coherent and coordinated support strategies, with universities playing a critical role in research, innovation, and capacity development for landscape partnerships going forward.