**1. Introduction**

Climate change, food insecurity, poverty, biodiversity loss, and related threats to the well-being of people and planet are increasing the interest of policy makers, practitioners, and the private sector in landscape approaches, through which these challenges can be addressed in an integrated manner [1,2]. Landscape approaches usually promote multi-functionality in terms of agricultural, livelihood,

conservation, and climate objectives, and stress the need for iterative processes of understanding, negotiation, and decision-making among different stakeholders [3–5]. The emphasis on such processes corresponds with notions of cross-sectoral forms of environmental governance [6] and environmental policy integration [7]. Closely related is the concept of integrated landscape management, referring to actions designed to achieve multiple outcomes in the landscape, ultimately contributing to the holistic pursuit of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [8–10].

Landscape managemen<sup>t</sup> is influenced by formal, semi-formal, and informal decision-making processes involving multiple actors in the landscape and beyond, whose interests do not always align [11–14]. Moreover, there is usually no single legal basis for decision-making at the landscape level, and policies at different spatial–administrative levels may be conflicting [15,16]. This is particularly the case when administrative boundaries are not in line with the socio-ecological processes of landscapes [17]. In the context of such challenges, attention for landscape governance has been growing [12,18]. As institutional and jurisdictional fragmentation is common, landscape governance is usually conceptualized as 'polycentric', involving multiple centers of decision-making [17,19–21].

The term landscape governance is frequently used by academics, practitioners, and policymakers alike, but its meaning is not always consistent. In scientific literature, landscape governance is primarily an analytic concept, drawing attention to the connections between natural places and socially constructed spaces [22]. As such, it is used to combine the lens of natural conditions of a place with the lenses of discourses and institutional practices [15,23].

Others have conceptualized landscape governance in a more applied sense. In their 2015 publication, Kozar et al., for example, draw on practical experience to synthesize 'what works' for landscape governance systems. According to them, landscape governance is "concerned with the institutional arrangements, decision-making processes, policy instruments and underlying values in the system by which multiple actors pursue their interests in sustainable food production, biodiversity and ecosystem service conservation and livelihood security in multifunctional landscapes." As such, landscape governance refers to the combination of decision-making processes of both state and non-state actors, which together shape the day-to-day practical actions of management. It stresses principles such as dialogue, negotiation, and the need to balance agricultural, conservation, livelihood, and climate objectives [12].

Civil society organizations (CSOs) can help make landscape governance more inclusive and sustainable, among others, by building capacity of local stakeholders to stand up for their rights and participate in decision-making processes, lobbying for policies to promote inclusion and sustainability, facilitating multi-stakeholder processes, and acting as watchdogs [24–26].

In this article we aim to reflect on landscape governance from a practical perspective, building on experiences of the Green Livelihoods Alliance (GLA), which is an international program that supports CSOs to contribute to inclusive and sustainable landscape governance. We describe how the GLA used the notion of landscape governance to develop assessment workshops as part of its monitoring and evaluation framework, and share practical lessons regarding the role of CSOs in strengthening landscape governance. We will address the following questions: What are the desirable characteristics of landscape governance? How can progress be measured? Additionally, how can CSOs help to improve landscape governance? First, we introduce a method that the GLA developed to assess changes in landscape governance. In Section 3, we present some of the main outcomes of assessments conducted in 14 landscapes, with examples from African landscapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, and Uganda. Section 4 of the article builds on these findings, and reflects on the role that CSOs can play as convenors of multi-stakeholder processes, as a central component of inclusive landscape governance for sustainable development.
