Paper short abstract:

This talk will provide an overview of the imperative to ground conceptions of poverty with local realities.

Paper long abstract:

Integrated landscape approaches (ILAs) are gaining momentum, broad interest in their potential stems from the possibility of reconciling climate, conservation and development imperatives. A number of ILAs have already been implemented around the world, including the forested tropical landscapes of Latin America. These landscapes are often home to traditional communities, including small-scale farmers living closely to the land. The potential of ILAs to contribute to the values that matter most to the human well-being of rural populations, depends on first understanding what values are most salient to traditional communities. However, the plurality of values – that is the material, subjective and relational types of values - that exist has not been given full acknowledgement in ILA implementation, or evaluation. Rather, a tendency to focus on pre-determined, externally defined, and material values dominates research and practice. Crucially these tendencies risk undermining the potential contribution of ILAs to local communities because they can invisible the values that matter most, and in worse cases, can generate social-cultural harms. This empirical work sought to bring visibility to the place-based values that matter most. Using questionnaire data from >300 rural traditional peoples living across four types of landscape intervention in the Brazilian Amazon (two extractive reserves, one protected area and one intensified agriculture landscape), we present data on how local people define well-being and identify the types of values that matter most. Using these place-based worldviews as a starting point, we use perception-based impact assessment to understand how distinct interventions, across a land-sparing, land-sharing spectrum, contribute to locally prioritised values and well-being. This research is geared to inform ILA design that can enhance what matters most to local communities, and offers a method that can be used to gather local perceptions and views that are essential to justice and equity in ILA implementation.