Ecology & Society: Engaging with justice in integrated landscape approaches

Climate and biodiversity crises, conflicts over access to land, water, or food, multiple and overlapping types of land management and livelihoods are some of the players that describe current landscape challenges worldwide. It has been broadly acknowledged that addressing interconnected social and ecological challenges needs integrated solutions at landscape scale. Integrated landscape approaches (ILAs) are governance strategies that deal with these complex social and ecological challenges. Yet, many of these governance strategies lack a nuanced attention to the injustices that manifest themselves in landscape governance, use, and management. These injustices influence the strategies chosen and how they can be reached. In this synthesis, we first identify the injustices that can appear in, and shape a given landscape, empirically illustrating how ILAs can relate to multiple dimensions of justice. We highlight methods suitable for studying injustices in landscapes from an academic perspective. Later, we share and reflect about our positionality, and our experiences of struggling, in harnessing a more transgressive science that engages with landscape justice. We argue that identifying, understanding, and reflecting on how to address injustice in landscape research should become a crucial step in implementing ILAs.