Guide
Landscape Initiative Maturity: Operationalizing a shared maturity framework through assessment
A joint set of sub-criteria supporting the assessment of landscape initiative maturity.
Landscape initiatives bring together diverse actors, from communities and civil society to businesses and governments, to address complex environmental, social, and economic challenges in a coordinated way. As these initiatives evolve, a shared understanding of what underpins their credibility, effectiveness, and capacity to deliver impact becomes increasingly important.
The Landscape Initiative Maturity (LIM) framework was designed to meet this need, offering a structured way to evaluate the foundational elements that drive success. By focusing on critical aspects like scale, governance, collective action, and monitoring, the framework looks at whether the building blocks for effective action are in place. While initiatives operate across different contexts and stages of development, LIM provides a common reference point to help them understand where they are, strengthen their foundations, and support long-term resilience.
The collective position paper, developed by the ISEAL Landscape Practitioner Network, outlines the agreed criteria for mature landscape initiatives and is available for download.
The LIM framework builds on several years of collaborative work to define what maturity looks like for landscape initiatives. This journey began in 2023 with CDP’s Landscape Maturity Matrix, which articulated a set of core criteria intended to help assess the quality and effectiveness of landscape initiatives. Building on this foundation, a joint position paper developed in early 2024 through collaboration among LandScale, ISEAL, CDP, and SBTN set out an initial set of sub-criteria to support more consistent, detailed, and evaluable interpretation of these core criteria.
Later that year, this work was further advanced through the publication of a collective position paper developed by ISEAL’s Landscape Practitioner Network (referenced above). This latest iteration expanded and refined the sub-criteria used to assess each core criterion, offering more nuanced guidance that reflects the diversity of landscape contexts and initiative pathways. The inclusion of qualitative elements strengthens the framework’s ability to capture how maturity is expressed in practice across different settings.
To operationalize this shared maturity framework, LandScale partnered with SourceUp to design a practical evaluation approach that can be applied consistently across landscapes. This collaboration applies the sub-criteria in a structured way, helping initiatives assess the maturity of their enabling structures and processes.
Understanding the maturity of a landscape initiative can be a powerful enabler. For initiatives themselves, it helps surface strengths, identify gaps, and prioritize areas for development. For partners, investors, and other supporters, it provides a clear basis for understanding an initiative’s governance, coordination, and organizational readiness. By creating a shared reference point for maturity, the LIM framework supports more informed decision-making and more deliberate progress over time.