Landscape initiative maturity
Landscape initiative maturity offers a framework for assessing governance, coordination, and capacity of landscape initiatives, helping you understand how your initiative is progressing, identify areas for improvement, and track development over time.
Elevate your landscape initiative’s credibility
What the landscape initiative maturity evaluation helps you do
Landscape initiative maturity combines a shared concept, a framework, and an evaluation process to provide a consistent way of assessing the structures and processes that support landscape initiatives. It acts as a diagnostic tool to support reflection and continuous improvement, enabling initiatives to understand their progress, identify strengths and gaps, and track how their systems develop over time. For partners, donors, and investors, it provides a clearer basis for understanding how initiatives are structured and where engagement or support may be most effective. See how this works in practice:
How it works
Landscape initiative maturity is built on the core criteria for mature landscape initiatives, developed through a global, multi-stakeholder process. These criteria reflect widely recognized best practices for integrated landscape management and provide a consistent way to evaluate whether the essential elements for effective collective action are in place. In practice, the approach supports initiatives to:
Assess
Understand the current state of governance, coordination, and capacity
Identify
Highlight strengths and areas where further development is needed
Track
Monitor how systems evolve over time
Communicate
Provide a clearer basis for engagement with partners and stakeholders
What maturity looks like
Mature landscape initiatives are not defined only by the outcomes they deliver, but by the systems that enable those outcomes. These elements reflect the core criteria used to assess maturity and provide a roadmap for strengthening how initiatives function and evolve. They typically demonstrate progress across four interdependent areas:
Scale
Operating within a defined landscape boundary, such as a jurisdiction or watershed, that is large enough to influence system-level conditions
Multi-stakeholder governance
A structured platform where diverse stakeholders collaborate, make decisions, and align priorities
Collective goals and actions
Shared goals supported by coordinated action plans and implementation
Collective monitoring
Systems to track progress, establish baselines, and report transparently over time
Why this matters for investment and partnerships
Landscape initiative maturity does not replace impact data. It complements it by helping to understand the systems that enable long-term outcomes and by providing a basis for comparing how initiatives are developing over time. A key challenge in landscape approaches is not only mobilizing finance but ensuring that resources are directed toward supporting effective action. Understanding how a landscape initiative is developing can help:
Initiatives
- Clarify strengths and gaps in governance and coordination
- Support prioritization of effort and resources
- Track maturity progress over time
Partners and investors
- Provide visibility into initiatives’ governance structures and long-term sustainability goals
- Support more informed engagement decisions
- understand how you can support initiatives in advancing along their journey towards maturity
You can also explore how these concepts are applied in real-world contexts:
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Whether you are leading a landscape initiative or supporting one, understanding how systems are developing can help strengthen coordination, improve decision-making, and support long-term impact.