EcoAgriculture Partners

09/30/2026

In our final days of operation, EcoAgriculture Partners board and staff have been reflecting on EcoAg’s impact over the past 25 years. Together, we developed a field of knowledge and practice, advocated for it locally and internationally, and integrated it into the global conservation and development movements.

As a convening organization, EcoAg has thrived because of its relationships, creating formal and informal networks of leaders and practitioners that infuse the integrated landscape movement with joy and connection as well as intellectual exchange. We deeply appreciate your involvement in the creation and momentum of this movement.

In our farewell blog post, Heidi I. Jones and Sara Scherr reflect on EcoAg's evolution, impact, and legacy, and share details on how to stay connected and access our work going forward.

🔗 Read our farewell blog post here: https://ecoagriculture.org/a-farewell-message-ecoags-legacy-and-a-reflection-from-sara-scherr/

Though EcoAgriculture Partners completes its life cycle, the mission continues. 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People will continue to convene landscape leaders, researchers, and practitioners, alongside many other partner organizations dedicated to advancing integrated landscape action. We hope you continue to engage with courage and hope for a thriving future for communities, landscapes, and the planet.

Thank you for all your support throughout the years.

A Farewell Message: EcoAg's Legacy and a Reflection from Sara Scherr

09/30/2026

To our beloved community,

In our final days of operation, EcoAgriculture Partners board and staff have been reflecting on EcoAg’s impact over the past 25 years. Together, we developed a field of knowledge and practice, advocated for it locally and internationally, and integrated it into the global conservation and development movements.

As a convening organization, EcoAg has thrived because of its relationships, creating formal and informal networks of leaders and practitioners that infuse the integrated landscape movement with joy and connection as well as intellectual exchange. We deeply appreciate your involvement in the creation and momentum of this movement.

In our farewell blog post, Heidi Jones and Sara Scherr reflect on EcoAg's evolution, impact, and legacy, and share details on how to stay connected and access our work going forward.

🔗 Read our farewell blog post here: https://ecoagriculture.org/a-farewell-message-ecoags-legacy-and-a-reflection-from-sara-scherr/

Though EcoAgriculture Partners completes its life cycle, the mission continues. 1000 Landscapes For 1 Billion People will continue to convene landscape leaders, researchers, and practitioners, alongside many other partner organizations dedicated to advancing integrated landscape action. We hope you continue to engage with courage and hope for a thriving future for communities, landscapes, and the planet.

Thank you for all your support throughout the years.

A Farewell Message: EcoAg's Legacy and a Reflection from Sara Scherr

09/22/2026

Changing the Conversation About Landscape Finance

Landscape ambitions are often bigger than any single project, grant or funding source.

A landscape may be working simultaneously on livelihoods, food systems, biodiversity, restoration and water. Financing those priorities requires coordination across institutions and across public, private and philanthropic sources.
EcoAgriculture Partners spent years working with partners on this challenge, exploring how finance could be better connected to landscape priorities, governance and long-term collaboration.

As Sara Scherr, EcoAg founder, put it, “The investment world must fund projects contributing to an integrated landscape strategy.”

Over time, the work also reinforced something that is easy to overlook in discussions about landscape finance: the hardest part is often not developing another framework or financial mechanism. It is the sustained human work required to build coalitions, align priorities, structure viable opportunities and maintain collaboration across a living landscape.

That work is rarely adequately financed, yet it is often what makes investment possible in the first place.

This is why EcoAg’s landscape finance work was closely connected to its wider work on governance, leadership and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Alongside developing methods and tools for understanding financial flows and building investment pathways, EcoAg worked with partners on the enabling conditions that allow finance to respond to real landscape priorities.

Across years of research, experimentation and partnership, EcoAg helped advance landscape finance as a field rooted not only in capital and investment, but in the people, institutions and relationships needed to put that finance to work.
Explore EcoAg’s landscape finance resources:

https://ecoagriculture.org/resource-library/?filter=true&resource-topic-tag=integrated-landscape-finance
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09/15/2026

Building the Conditions for Collective Action

Bringing people together around a landscape is only the beginning.
For collaboration to lead somewhere, people need ways to build trust, establish shared priorities, navigate different interests, make decisions and keep working together over time.

Much of EcoAgriculture Partners’ work focused on these conditions. Across different landscapes and partnerships, we worked on inclusive governance, facilitation, local leadership and the structures that allow people with different responsibilities and perspectives to participate in the same process.

That work took shape through multi-stakeholder platforms, public-private-civic partnerships and locally led initiatives, including seed grants that gave landscape leaders room to put shared priorities into practice.

The value of those spaces comes through clearly in the experience of Leonardo Diniz of the Mata Atlântica Model Forest, “It was the first time many of these groups had sat at the same table, sharing their visions and realizing that their goals were not so different.”

Years of learning from processes like these also became practical resources on landscape partnerships, participatory planning, governance and collective action. Many of them remain available in EcoAg’s resource library.

Explore EcoAg’s tools for collective action:
ecoagriculture.org/resource-library/

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09/10/2026

Landscape Leadership Across Latin America

Across Latin America, EcoAgriculture Partners’ work has taken many forms, but a consistent thread has been supporting people and organizations to work more collaboratively across landscapes.

With the teams from Heifer Project International, , this meant bringing a stronger landscape and food systems perspective into their work. Through the International Model Forests Network and its regional networks, it meant supporting collaborative governance, leadership development and learning across territories.

In the Forest Leaders for Integrated Landscape Management program, that learning moved into practical action across 15 Model Forests in 10 countries. Training, peer exchange, research and seed funding gave landscape leaders opportunities to test approaches, strengthen governance and move shared priorities forward.

For Yésica Quispe of the Abancay Model Forest, the experience changed how territorial management was understood, “We had been working from a very sector-based logic, and changing that way of looking at territorial management is not easy.”
She reflected that one of the program’s greatest contributions was deepening understanding of what it means to work from an Integrated Landscape Management perspective, supported by exchanges with other Model Forests. The seed fund also helped bring actors together, establish a coordination committee with a three-year mandate, and build a stronger shared identity for the Abancay Model Forest.

The program also supported five research fellows whose work explored questions emerging directly from Model Forests, including youth leadership, participation, governance and locally led landscape action.

Together, these experiences reflect a much longer commitment to strengthening landscape leadership in the region and grounding Integrated Landscape Management in the realities of particular places.

Explore EcoAg’s work across Latin America:
https://ecoagriculture.org/resource-library/?filter=true®ion-of-focus=latin-america
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09/08/2026

Building a Landscape Movement Across Africa 🌳💚
EcoAgriculture Partners fostered relationships across Africa, creating spaces for landscape leaders to exchange experiences, confront challenges, and shape a wider agenda for action.
In Kenya, we worked with KENVO and KenLAP to connect biodiversity, agriculture, and local livelihoods. Our impact? Improved productivity, income, and people's livelihoods.
Explore our work and resources across Africa: https://ecoagriculture.org/resource-library/?filter=true®ion-of-focus=africa

09/03/2026

When Landscapes Became the Unit of Action

For more than two decades, one idea ran through much of EcoAgriculture Partners’ work: the challenges facing people and nature cannot be understood one sector at a time.

Food production, water, biodiversity, climate, livelihoods and land use meet in the same places. Decisions about one inevitably shape the others.
As Sara Scherr, EcoAgriculture Partners' founder, put it in 2021, “landscape patterns and processes affect outcomes at the household, farm, and market-level.”

EcoAgriculture Partners worked with partners to help build the research, practice and tools for addressing those connections at the landscape level. Over time, that work contributed to the development of Integrated Landscape Management and to practical guidance that landscape leaders could use on the ground. The carousel traces that progression from early work connecting agriculture and landscapes to defining ILM and supporting its implementation.

As EcoAgriculture Partners prepares to close, we are revisiting some of the ideas and resources that shaped our work and the wider landscape field over the past 21 years.
Explore EcoAg’s resources on Integrated Landscape Management:
ecoagriculture.org/resource-library/

08/18/2026

We Rebuilt the Website for What Comes Next

Over more than two decades, EcoAgriculture Partners and our collaborators have produced research, practical tools, guides, videos, and stories from landscapes around the world.
As EcoAg prepares to close at the end of September, we wanted to make sure that work remains easy to find and use.

So we rebuilt our website.

The redesigned site brings together work from across EcoAg’s history, from early thinking on ecoagriculture and integrated landscape management to more recent work on landscape leadership, governance, finance, and food systems.

Over the coming weeks, we will continue preparing the site for EcoAg’s closure and its transition into a static archive. We will also use this time to revisit some of the resources, places, people and partnerships that have shaped EcoAg’s work, and to help others find and use what we are leaving behind.

We hope the website remains a useful place to learn from that work and build on it.

Explore the redesigned EcoAgriculture website: https://ecoagriculture.org/

08/14/2026

Leadership lives far beyond the meeting room

We close our Research Fellows series in the Cábecar Indigenous Territory of Alto Chirripó, Costa Rica, where women help shape community life in ways that formal governance structures do not always capture.

Research Fellow Cristina Fueres explored how Indigenous and rural women exercise leadership within the Reventazón Model Forest Platform. Her findings invite us to look beyond positions on boards of directors or associations and recognize the leadership women demonstrate in their homes, educational spaces, spiritual life, and throughout their communities.

By making these contributions more visible, Cristina’s research offers a fuller picture of who participates in territorial governance and how.

Cristina is the fifth and final fellow featured in this series, which has taken us across Latin America through research grounded in the experiences, knowledge, and priorities of local communities.

Watch Cristina share what she learned and help us celebrate the five Research Fellows whose work has enriched the Forest Leaders for Integrated Landscape Management project, under the supervision of Dr. Bemmy Granados.

Download te fulll research paper and briefs: https://ecoagriculture.org/resource/liderazgo-femenino-en-paisajes-forestales-para-la-gestion-integrada-del-paisaje-gip-resumen-de-investigacion/

07/31/2026

Leadership Grows Through Practice
Young people are often invited to participate in environmental activities. Marlon Patiño’s research in the Risaralda Model Forest shows what can happen when they are also trusted to investigate, propose solutions, and help guide action.

Through a participatory action research process, young people examined the ecological and social pressures affecting protected areas in their territory. Their work connected environmental interpretation and field visits with tools such as problem trees, helping them understand how forest fragmentation, water pollution, production systems, wildlife pressures, and the legacy of armed conflict interact across the landscape.

The research found that youth leadership grows when participation is connected to real territorial challenges and supported by relationships between youth groups, educational institutions, environmental authorities, and other local organizations.
It also highlights the need for lasting spaces where young people can contribute to restoration, reforestation, environmental education, and decisions about the future of protected areas. Participation becomes more meaningful when young people can move from learning about a landscape to actively shaping it.

Read the research briefs or download Marlon’s full paper, Participatory Action Research: Transition Towards Youth Leadership in Protected Areas of the Risaralda Model Forest.

Research brief in English:https://ecoagriculture.org/resources/scientific-publications/resource-scientific-publication-12participatory-action-research-transitioning-toward-youth-leadership-in-protected-areas-of-the-risaralda-model-forest

Resumen de investigación en español: https://ecoagriculture.org/resources/scientific-publications/investigacion-accion-participativa-transicion-hacia-un-liderazgo-juvenil-en-areas-protegidas-del-bosque-modelo-risaralda-resumen-de-investigacion

Full research paper: https://ecoagriculture.org/resources/scientific-publications/investigacion-accion-participativa-para-fortalecer-el-liderazgo-juvenil-en-el-bosque-modelo-risaralda

1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People