The project will involve applying the governance assessment framework to four cases representing diverse governance systems for landscape level ecosystems in three countries:
- The Tanzanian portion of the greater Serengeti ecosystem is under the jurisdiction of various types of protected areas as well as an array of Village, District and National level government actors outside of the protected areas. There is no single entity charged with managing the whole ecosystem; however, there is a forum that brings together all these and other stakeholders in order to share information and coordinate actions.
- The Muskwa-Kechika Management Area in British Columbia, Canada is unusual in that it is governed by a set of arrangements embodied in its own, unique piece of legislation. While it has conventional protected areas within it, the area as a whole is meant to be “a working wilderness” where resource extraction and other economic activities can proceed but with an eye to maintaining the wilderness character of the region.
- Kenya has a number of “water towers” — mountains or highlands with much higher levels of precipitation than the surrounding lowlands and which serve important hydrological, ecological and economic functions far beyond the water tower itself. One of these is Mt. Marsabit, an extinct shield volcano whose cloud forest is the water source for both for communities on the mountain and for people who live in the surrounding lowlands. It also contains areas which are critical to pastoralists as reserve pastures used in drought emergencies. The case study examined district-level governance mechanisms for managing the Mt. Marsabit ecosystem and regulating access to natural resources.
- The Southern Gulf Islands (SGI) region of British Columbia, Canada is an area of some 1400 sq kilometers in the Southern Strait of Georgia between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. Ecologically, the SGIs are representative of the Strait of Georgia Lowlands, one of the most ecologically at risk natural regions in southern Canada, and supports an array of protected areas at the national, provincial, regional and community level. There is no single entity charged with governing the region; however Islands Trust with its mandate to preserve and protect the trust area in which the SGIs are encompassed, plays a pivotal governance role in the SGIs connecting with municipalities, regional districts and federal and provincial governments in what could be called a governance system for the SGIs.