Whole Landscapes, Whole Communities: Working with Nature to Heal, Transform and Regenerate Landscapes

"Regenerating landscapes starts with building community relationships, invoking ownership, and crafting a shared vision for the future. This guide is pointing us in the direction of that hopeful future."

This Barefoot Guide is an introduction to the community-based landscape work of the Seed Knowledge Initiative (SKI), a partnership of Southern African organisations committed to securing food sovereignty and promoting climate resiliency in the region. The illustrated resource offers guidance on how to go about working with communities - in particular, with smallholder farmers - to become more seed, food, and nutritionally secure through farmer-led seed systems, improved crop diversity, and the revival of local knowledge systems. It is designed to provide inspiration and lessons through the stories of people who have worked in a community-based fashion to transform damaged lands into bountiful landscapes in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, and Burkina Faso.

The book's 4 chapters include:

1. Landscapes and life: Cyclone Idai creates rivers of stone
2. Landscape management: The wisdom of the elders
3. The lamenting is over: Where are people regenerating landscapes?
4. Bountiful landscapes: When communities work together

The latter chapter includes a process for working with communities, outlining the following principles for facilitators and leaders:

• In light of the SKI's conviction that "Community ownership of the initiative AND process is the foundation of sustainability", always ask: "Who is participating in whose process?"
• Include all stakeholders so they can play their part in regenerating the landscape; local government structures are a key group of stakeholders who may facilitate or hinder the work at community level.
• Help to surface local and indigenous knowledge, which is often hidden in the stories of the elders; honouring and enhancing this expertise can make the community feel respected, empowered, and more receptive to outside knowledge and expertise.
• Respect, use, and strengthen existing structures and processes so they can carry the initiative into the future when the project and funding end.
• Look for ways to encourage people to take initiative and leadership of every task.
• Do not try to act as the hero or saviour, and do not take sides in any conflict.
• Be enthusiastic but help people to find and grow their own enthusiasm and will, being aware that people's willingness may be dampened by fear, self-doubt, conflict, or resentment of some kind; learn to surface and deal with these.
• Go beyond conventional technical work to change old power relationships that disempower some (e.g., women) unjustly or that keep farmers impoverished because of their dependence on powerful agro-corporations.
• Seek to actively and creatively bring out the best in government, letting them engage with and experience the community for themselves.
• Have clarity on the role of funding to ensure that it does not destroy local ownership.

Of the guide, SKI states: "We...hope that people elsewhere will read this and start talking about the opportunities we have to change how we think about the future, and how they might go about landscape-level work where they live."

While SKI has relationships with a number of organisations and individuals all over the world, its primary stakeholders are farmers in Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The initiative started in 2013 and has since grown to include 16 partner organisations across those 4 Southern African countries. The Barefoot Guide Connection is a global community of practice from dozens of countries, on every continent, dedicated to promoting the writing and sharing of real stories, approaches, ideas, and resources about effective social development and change practice. Through storytelling and action learning based case study writing, the group supports on-the-ground practitioners to value their experience and appreciate the insights and wisdom they can offer to others. This particular Barefoot Guide was supported financially by SwedBio and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).