The story
Over the past 8 years, Commonland and our landscape partners have been exploring what it means to develop long-term, large-scale holistic landscape restoration programmes based on the 4 Returns framework. Our landscape partners in Australia, The Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and India, have worked hard to unite stakeholders, develop a future vision, and put this vision into practice through restoration activities, business development, knowledge exchange, and inspirational initiatives.
This has led to an incredible boost of hope and connection in the landscapes, inspiring many farmers to make the transition to regenerative agriculture and an economic boost due to new businesses.
These milestones have brought the question to the surface: how do we bring this progress to the next level, and scale our impact in and beyond our landscape? We have a common ambition to make landscape restoration the new normal. An ambition that’s crucial to the system shift needed to reverse our planet’s massive degradation and species extinction.
To explore this question, we went on a 3-month (online) learning journey together. In these ‘Mountain Trails’, we prioritised time for learning and exchanging our experiences together. We dived into theories and matched them with first-hand experience.
In this series of stories, we highlight several of our learnings. We hope they provide you with inspiration for your scaling journeys.
- 4 Returns in Practice | Scaling the impact of holistic landscape restoration – recording & main takeaways from our Summit
- From scaling solutions to creating resilience at scale
- Five characteristics of a resilient system
- Scaling in a landscape partnership (to be released soon)
- An enabling environment for scaling (to be released soon)
- Reaching New Heights in Systemic Impact: A Story of my Mountain Trail | by Luis Leblanc, Mountain Trail participant
If you’d like to get introduced to the landscapes that participated in this learning journey, check out their landscape stories:
- Chhattisgarh, India
- Dutch Peat Meadows, the Netherlands
- Altiplano Estepario, Spain
- Baviaanskloof-Langkloof, South Africa
- Southwest Australia
To learn more about the topic, check out the list of further reading and tools that we’ve found helpful in our learning process.
Theories, food for thought & examples
- The Two Loops: A Guide to Times of Transformation – Ben Wolfe
- Is weaving the new scaling? – Zairah Khan
- Review of scaling concepts – University of Uppsala
- Strategy to scale social innovation for development – UNDP Accelerator labs
- Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale – The Berkana Institute
- Walk Out, Walk On – stories of addressing systems change in through local/ community action
- To scale, or not to scale – that is not the only question – PhD thesis by Seerp Wigboldus
- Weaving Networked Action for Systemic Change – A Practical Guide – Adrian Röbke & Namrata Arora
- System’s change crash course – Ashoka
- Spring Impact – Sweet spot for scale: Critically assess the scalability of your solution by ensuring it has impact, value and sustainability baked into it.
