Landscape approaches and area-based approaches aim to enhance sustainable development through systemic change, by actively involving all stakeholders in a defined geographic zone. While increasingly common to address ecological challenges like deforestation, examples of landscape approaches to address social issues like child labour in cocoa are still rare. A new report published by ICI examines their potential.
The new study analyses examples of six landscape approaches in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Uganda. It describes their design, set-up and results, and identifies common challenges and promising practices.
The study aimed to assess the effectiveness of landscape approaches at reducing child labour. However, the review found a lack of evidence on the impact of landscape approaches on child labour, making it difficult to determine the potential of landscape approaches as a means of effectively reducing child labour. This is due to several reasons: the limited maturity of the six case studies examined; a lack of robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks; and challenges related to implementing activities at scale within landscapes.
Despite the lack of evidence, in theory, landscape approaches may have the potential to support effective and sustainable action to prevent and address child labour and are likely to be increasingly used in the coming years as a means of coordinating the efforts of multiple stakeholders at a meaningful scale.
The six case studies provide insights into common challenges encountered at a landscape scale, as well as highlighting some good practices for setting up and implementing landscape programmes:
- Plan for long timeframes and invest in cultural change. Landscape approaches are long-term endeavours that require significant time to set up and even longer to achieve any results.
- Involve communities, local public stakeholders, traditional authorities, and public and private organisations from the start. This helps ensure the programme design is relevant, to integrate local knowledge and foster local ownership and shared responsibility.
- Develop a Theory of Change, involving all stakeholders. This defines how change is expected to happen in the context of a specific landscape and should be used to align objectives and methods, as well as to monitor progress.
- Aim for joint public-private financial partnerships. Pooled funding mechanisms ensure funds are available to implement activities and help promote shared responsibility for outcomes.
- Invest in monitoring and evaluation to improve performance and measure impact.