The Kehicap (Symposiachrus boanensis) or Black-chinned monarch is a bird species whose entire world population of 100–200 individuals survives in a few tiny patches of forest on the remote Indonesian Island of Buano in the Moluccas. The main threat to the Kehicap is fuelwood gathering by a relatively small population of local people. The habitat of the Kehicap is a protected forest (Hutan Lindung), and local people are violating the law when they harvest fuelwood. The future of the Kehicap is a classic example of a wicked problem. There is a direct conflict between measures to protect the species and the livelihoods of local people. There are huge and irreconcilable differences in their understanding of what the problem is – or even of whether there is a problem. Policies to counter forest loss and degradation have fallen short in achieving these goals. Devolution of forest management to local communities offers promise but also challenges. Wicked problems cannot all be solved one at a time – they will cease to exist when mature and effective institutions emerge to regulate the activities of a prosperous and well-educated population.

SDG 15 requires the maintenance of life on land and endorses priorities already established through international conventions and agreements. The scale, and complexity, of tropical forest loss and biodiversity decline versus the limited resources for conservation and forestry pose many challenges. The main innovation of SDG 15 is that decision makers will see this goal as one to integrate with other SDGs; the risk is that short-term priorities and a ‘business as usual’ approach will undermine this. We examine these opportunities and challenges, the factors that impinge upon them and how they may play out over the next decade. There will be trade-offs between SDG 15 and other SDGs resulting from competition for land, but there are also synergies and opportunities that require recognition. We encourage conservation and development professionals to engage with those responsible for all the Agenda 2030 targets to ensure that SDG 15 is a priority in all SDG related processes.

Researchers have finite resources and will seek to allocate these most efficiently. Therefore, they need to identify and assess priorities for research, monitor the progress of on-going research and evaluate the impacts of completed research. This is a difficult enough process in highly focussed technological research projects, but it is even more of a challenge for complex natural resource systems. The scale and complexity of assessment expands with the complexity of the system. Impact assessment for natural resources research requires quite different approaches to those used for technology improvement research. In this chapter we argue for a different vision of the role and nature of impact assessment. We suggest that impact assessment should be an integral feature of natural resources research. We show how various approaches to impact assessment can be fundamental tools for adaptation, learning and performance enhancement, providing data for further negotiation amongst stakeholders as well as for resource allocation decisions.

Our review of approaches to impact assessment in natural resources research has a major implications for the way such research is organised. It strengthens the case for viewing research and management as part of a continuum with effective flows of information and ideas along a chain from the ‘hi-tech’ laboratory to the resource manager (Chapter 11). We find the ideas of Roussel and colleagues on Third Generation R&D very relevant to the natural resource management situation.

Research on integrated natural resource management should aim to help large numbers of people explore the full range of options that are available for dealing with their local resource management problems. This means creating an environment where science and knowledge help people to develop a diversity of locally appropriate resource management solutions. Integrated natural resource management research should emphatically not be about the discovery of single technological solutions, produced on research stations and made available for widespread application. Consequently, the problems of getting uptake of the results of integrated natural resource management research are quite different to those associated with promoting the adoption of a new technology produced in the research laboratory. Widespread adoption of integrated management techniques may involve changing entire farming, forestry and fishery systems. There are rarely any silver bullets; what is required is often the synchronised change of policies, institutions and technologies: the entire production system has to evolve.

In the past, scientists often blamed farmers for not adopting the latest technological innovations. Farmers were said to be excessively conservative or even insufficiently educated. Some scientists tacitly assumed that the poor in developing countries were simply not smart enough. Most people now accept that in many cases the farmers were very wise not to accept the unproven technologies that were on offer. The life of a poor farmer is fraught with risk and many of the products of research laboratories are ill-adapted to the vagaries of weather and pests that farmers have to deal with in their daily lives.

In the late 1990s, Maurice Strong led an external review of the consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). His team included Dr Mankoto Swaminathan, Prof. Bo Bengtsson and Dr Michel Griffon. They concluded that the crop improvement work that the CGIAR had focussed on since its foundation in the 1960s had been the best investment in development assistance ‘bar-none’. However, they recognised that times were changing and that the private sector, notably the large agro-industrial corporations, and a number of national research structures, for instance those of India and Brazil, were filling the niche previously occupied by the CGIAR. They advocated a new orientation for the CGIAR and a focus on the resource management problems confronting poor people in marginal areas. They urged that more attention be given to global environmental problems and to the implications of these for poor farmers, foresters and fishermen. They advocated an emphasis on integrated natural resource management research. This book is based upon the work of a task force that was established by the CGIAR to implement the recommendations of Maurice Strong's review.

The task force included scientists from a wide range of backgrounds who were all working towards the goal of managing rural tropical landscapes for the dual goals of enhancing productivity and sustaining environmental values. None of its members had a complete recipe for achieving this. But many of us had elements of answers.

Sixty-five years ago, Aldo Leopold laid down the challenge of developing a science of integrated natural resource management. But a vast gulf still exists between the high priests of theoretical ecology, the gurus of social processes and the real world of resource managers (farmers, fishers and foresters). In this book, we will attempt to understand why the manifestly sensible goal of managing natural resources in an integrated manner has proved so elusive. Our concern is with developing countries and with the effectiveness of attempts to promote ‘sustainable development’ for the vast populations of the world's poor people.

Many development assistance agencies now aspire to the dual missions of alleviating poverty and conserving the environment. Meanwhile, conservation organisations are claiming that their activities are yielding benefits for the poor. All are implying that natural resources can be managed in ways that achieve immediate benefits for local people whilst sustaining long-term local and global environmental values.

Zimbabwe has had a long and distinguished history of agricultural science, built on the classical transfer of technology model. A number of national and international research organisations have conducted excellent on-station technological research in the country. With hindsight, it is easy to find fault with much of this work, which has failed to address the realities of small-scale farmers. In this chapter, we first explore the component science and then describe a more integrated approach, drawing on a case study in southern Zimbabwe.

Component science in complex savanna environments

A good example is the Makoholi Research Station. It is part of the Division of Livestock and Pastures, one of the divisions in the national agricultural research service. This station is 150km from Chivi, the area we return to later in this chapter. The work at Makoholi should serve the needs of smallholder farmers, the main stakeholders for work of the national research organisation. In 1993, the station housed six professional officers and six research technicians and 13 projects were being undertaken. The work covered a large number of narrowly focussed projects. These included studies of cow performance in relation to use of cows for draught power; characterisation of goat production systems; performance of goats in relation to variety, feed supplementation, dipping and watering; sheep breed digestion studies; production characteristics of forage grasses and legumes; and digestibility studies of legume trees and shrubs. Some of the work was probably quite useful.

The natural forests of the hillsides of the Andean Mountains in central and northern South America are reputed to contain higher diversities of flora and fauna than any other forests in the world. They also protect the watersheds of the rivers that provide water for the countries of the region. However, these same hillsides are also major producers of food: 40% of the food produced in the Andean countries comes from hillside agriculture. They provide for the livelihoods of most of the rural poor of the countries from Peru to El Salvador. Hillside agro-ecosystems cover 96 million hectares in the region and similar land types extend into Brazil; 25 million hectares are already highly degraded and an additional 53 million hectares are experiencing rapid rates of erosion and deforestation. Some degree of erosion is seen on 50% of the hillsides of Colombia and 83% of the Andean region as a whole. Central America is said to have the region's highest proportion of its land with moderate to extreme erosion. And the situation is getting worse. The large farmers in the valleys are expanding their holdings and peasant farmers – the campesinos – are forced into the hills. The associated evils of drug production and trafficking and politically motivated banditry further erode the security of the lives of the people of this region.