10 years of convening landscape initiatives: Learnings for success

IDH has been developing collaborative landscape initiatives with private and public sector partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America for over a decade. 

During this time, we have seen that landscape initiatives are not only a good way to accelerate sustainable land management and increase famer livelihoods, but they are also a very effective route to share risk, reduce costs, and create lasting change. 

IDH aims to protect and restore ecosystems and degraded land at scale by encouraging pre-competitive collaboration to collective challenges like deforestation, decarbonising value chains and increasing farmer resilience.  

As well as sharing our top 10 lessons from the last 10 years of IDH’s support for landscape approaches, we invite others to join us in protecting landscapes for the years to come. 

1. The core currency is trust

It takes time to build trust and alignment with stakeholders, achieved through engagement, listening, and small-scale concrete actions.

  We have learned over the years that trust also comes from the expertise and insights that IDH can provide to the stakeholders. This trust is what enabled us to develop programmes very rapidly, for example EUDR compliance programmes with small farmers in Vietnam and Indonesia, built on existing relationships with local and national governments. 

2. Addressing a shared problem creates win-win-win

In South West Mau Forest, Kenya, multiple stakeholders were affected by the forest being degraded.  Tea production was reducing, communities suffered low incomes and used the forest for grazing, and there was less water for hydro power and drinking. A landscape approach benefitted all with a reduction in deforestation, positive impact on water cycles, and improved small producer income by two to three-fold outside the forest. 

3. The greatest business value is risk reduction

 As well as being cheaper and higher impact to work pre-competitively on aligned priorities than to do it farm by farm, the standout business value is often the reduction in risk, with spillover social or environmental risks declining dramatically. 

4. Collaboration reduces the cost of compliance

Collaborating with the Vietnamese government, IDH helped establish the world’s first national action plan for deforestation-free sourcing areas in compliance with EUDR. Independent analysis of Central Highlands of Vietnam shows that the cost of achieving regenerative outcomes together at landscape level was up to fifteen times cheaper than when companies did it alone. 

5. Private sector involvement is critical to reaching scale

In Mato Grosso, Brazil, the Sustainable Production of Calves program led to the development of a protocol that offers technical solutions for traceability in indirect beef supply. In September 2022, three of the leading meatpackers in the country set ambitious traceability targets critical to reaching scale. So far, there are over 200,000 animals in a traceability system as a crucial step in reducing deforestation.

In the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the number of companies engaging in strengthening the operation capacity of cooperatives and intermediaries has increased dramatically through the landscape programme. 

6. Positive results enable expansion to a greater area

In Aceh, Indonesia, a landscape initiative was set up to improve forest monitoring, restore degraded forest, and strengthen smallholder farmer income. Deforestation monitoring tools were used to calculate the results of forest protection practices. The positive results at a district level provided evidence for the initiative to expand to the provincial level, protecting a much greater area of biodiverse forest around the Leuser Ecosystem. 

7. Patience is needed to see the benefits

Multi-stakeholder coalitions take a year or two to establish. After that, positive impacts accelerate, since alignment is the key to tackling issues that need coordinated action, like anti-deforestation measures. Years three to five generally show a good return on the initial investment, with some of the biggest positive impacts emerging after year five. 

Individual projects from companies may feel faster, but they often end after two or three years with little long-term risk reduction for business and without durable benefits to farmers. The best landscape programmes create momentum that can tackle root causes of risk, like farmer and supply resilience to extreme weather events. 

8. Landscapes are not an investable asset class

Landscapes initiatives aim to improve sustainability, resilience, and inclusivity across a region, but they do not function as standalone financial assets. However, landscape-level initiatives can play a critical enabling role in improving governance, aligning stakeholders, and reducing systemic risks, which in turn makes investments more attractive. 

IDH has supported blended finance vehicles such as the &Green Fund and Agri3 Fund, which successfully integrate jurisdictional risk perspectives into their investment strategies. These funds show that while landscapes are not investable on their own, they can enhance the viability and impact of investments in real assets like farms, agribusinesses and forest projects. 

9. Landscape models can influence supply chains

 Landscape initiatives can be used to test and build resilient models to meet tomorrow’s challenges. These models for brands, governments, and farmers can then be taken up by supply chains, and help transform practise across a company or a sector. 

Following successful collaboration on sustainable palm projects, the Aceh Sustainable Palm Oil Working Group launched in August 2025 brings together major palm oil buyers, producers and refineries (Apical, Mars Wrigley, Mondelēz, Musim Mas, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Permata Group, PT SMART Tbk (Golden Agri-Resources), Unilever) to support the Aceh Roadmap for Sustainable Palm Oil. 

10. Exiting a lead role requires careful planning

Transitioning out of a landscape initiative requires careful planning to ensure continued good governance. Stakeholders engaged in the initiative must have full ownership of it to take over the convening role. Establishing an independent legal or institutional structure can give an initiative a solid basis to continue in the future.  

For example, in the South West Mau forest landscape in Kenya, we institutionalised the coalition through the creation of a Trust (the Stawisha Mau Charitable Trust). This makes the coalition more durable, but also enables it to manage funding that will support the convening and field activities moving forward. 

To find out more about existing landscape initiatives from IDH and many other organisations, visit SourceUp, where you can search through 65 existing initiatives by commodity or country.