Evaluating planning without plans: Principles, criteria and indicators for effective forest landscape approaches

Protecting forests is an increasingly essential and urgent priority to address the climate and biodiversity crises. These forests are home to communities, often Indigenous communities, who are facing multiple pressures including industrial extraction (logging and mining), illegal activities, as well as population growth and development, all of which drive land use change, forest loss and degradation. Addressing these multiple pressures requires integrated landscape approaches. Landscape planning has an important role to play in forest protection and conservation, including in areas of tropical primary forest in developing countries. However, resource and capacity limitations mean that planning activities in these contexts are often informal and nascent, rather than highly formalised in planning documents, and evaluation is limited. Robust tools to guide evaluation in emergent planning contexts can help improve planning processes and outcomes, and guide planners (community-based and otherwise) to choose and apply the right planning tools for the context. This paper develops an evaluation framework of principles, criteria and indicators for assessing informal and emerging forest landscape planning processes. The framework is designed particularly for stakeholders involved in forest landscapes planning processes with few resources and where formal technical capacity is limited. The framework will help guide and improve landscape planning for forest protection and sustainability.