The promises of land use cooperative initiatives: analyzing the design and performance of cooperative initiative for sustainable land use

Abstract

Addressing the land sector is key to help countries bridge the mitigation gap and advance the adaptation targets. Individual national governments’ forest restoration commitments and businesses’ zero deforestation pledges are slow to gain traction. Multi-stakeholders and cross-sectoral partnerships, identified by the literature as “international cooperative initiatives” may play a relevant role in raising the ambition of national governments’ commitments and fostering cooperation between the public and private sectors. Drawing on the literature on the effectiveness of transnational climate partnerships and supply chain initiatives, this research explores the realm of cooperative initiatives tackling land use. The aim of this research is to examine whether the presence of certain characteristics in the initiatives’ design influences their capacity of delivering on their desired goals, notably concerned with sustainable land use and forest management. For this purpose, a quantitative and qualitative analysis has been conducted to scrutinize and evaluate land use cooperative initiatives’ design and output performance. The empirical findings demonstrate that the presence of a quantified and verifiable target, a monitoring arrangement, the definition of resources needed and a well-defined and ambitious approach exert a positive influence on their performance. The New York Declaration on Forest offers a concrete example of well-designed land use cooperative initiative with a promising performance. However, the research highlights that the spectrum of well-performing land use initiatives also includes “call to actions” (high-level pledges), a type of initiative that has often succeeded to accomplish its advocacy functions, though poorly designed. Yet, it seems clear that, if compared against the same ultimate goal (e.g. halting deforestation), pledges do not hold the same potential as initiatives with a more structured and verifiable approach.