Barriers and enabling conditions for improved land restoration and climatic resilience in Oromia, Ethiopia

Watershed restoration is widely promoted as a strategy for climate adaptation and land degradation control, yet long-term uptake and maintenance of restoration practices remain persistent challenges. This study focuses on Oromia, Ethiopia, examining how continuity, durability, and scalability of restoration practices are shaped by interactions between key barriers and enabling conditions across governance levels. Drawing on qualitative focus group discussions with 43 participants, including farmers, local administrators, technical experts, and policy actors across three woredas in Arsi Zone, the analysis identifies three cross-cutting clusters: planning quality, ownership and engagement, and coordination and accountability. The findings show that in Oromia, weaknesses in planning processes, particularly a campaign-based, top-down and quota-driven approach, constrain contextual adaptation, learning, and agroecological fit, among other factors. Barriers related to ownership and engagement highlight that in Oromia's watershed campaigns, participation is frequently short-term and incentive-driven with limited collective responsibility for sustaining structures and practices beyond short-term mobilisation. Challenges in coordination and accountability in Oromia, including fragmented mandates across governance levels and monitoring systems oriented toward upward reporting rather than horizontal learning, undermine credibility and adaptive capacity after campaign periods. Across these clusters, the interaction between barriers and enabling conditions gives rise to pathways that shape whether restoration efforts translate into sustained land-use change. Taken together, the results suggest that improving restoration outcomes in Oromia require system-level shifts aligning planning processes, community ownership arrangements, and institutional accountability mechanisms. The study highlights locally led climate adaptation as a practical entry point through site-specific planning, locally grounded monitoring, and social learning.