Towards Sustainable Land Management - ‘Common Sense’ and some other key missing elements (the WOCAT experience)

Hanspeter Liniger, M Douglas & Gudrun Schwilch (2004)

A recent review of the data gathered for the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) program provided an opportunity to identify a number of the key elements, which if missing, will limit the effectiveness of local efforts to achieve sustainable land management. The key issues addressed are: common sense and critical questioning, preconceptions, biases and wishful thinking, poor understanding of land degradation processes, lack of impact assessment of conservation, lack of a holistic assessment and failure to understand the context, insufficient use of land users’ own experiences, and the inflexibility of proposed solutions.