What could forest landscape restoration look like in the Ramu-Markham Valley of Papua New Guinea?

Implementing global environmental initiatives at the local level requires modifications to accommodate site-specific factors such as social organisation, land tenure and gender. This is particularly challenging for forest restoration initiatives such as Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR), which require the cooperation and support of local communities and families. FLR has been developed as a global approach to forest restoration supported by various sets of guidelines and principles which may not fit local contexts. In this paper we explore how the local context of the traditional social organisation and gender roles in the Ramu-Markham Valley (RMV) of Papua New Guinea (PNG) could fit with a broad approach to FLR. We investigated villagers’ perceptions, preferences, gender roles and decision-making related to landscape restoration at the family and clan levels in three villages in the grasslands of the RMV. First, we confirmed that small-scale initiatives implemented with families better matched the traditional land use customs compared to a whole of landscape scale approach. Second, a family-based approach fitted with informants’ preferences on land use practices and accommodated shared decision-making of men and women within the family or household. Third, we found that the preferences of women and men often differ in terms of the types of services they want from trees and the preferred locations for planting. Fourth, we found that landscape restoration through agroforestry generates multiple benefits for livelihoods and the environment and can be incorporated into existing farming practices. Fifth, while FLR literature advocates a negotiated approach to managing landscapes as a mosaic of different uses rather than a planned approach, we found that neither a negotiated or centrally planned approach at a landscape level is practical in the RMV, because there are no decision-making social or administrative institutions that operate on a “whole of landscape scale”. Landscape restoration is in a preliminary stage in the RMV. This research suggests that the results of expanded efforts would meet the higher-level objectives of FLR: enhancing human well-being and regaining ecological functionality by applying an adaptive approach. We suggest that large numbers of small-scale farmer-based initiatives, at a family or clan level, have the potential to contribute to the higher objectives of FLR across a forest landscape.