Co-designing landscape governance architecture in Omo-Ghibe Living Landscape. A participatory process

Multifunctional landscapes provide several interconnected functions. They produce food, sustain livelihoods, regulate water, conserve biodiversity, store carbon, and maintain cultural and social values. These functions coexist in the same places and are shaped by people and institutions with different responsibilities, interests, and levels of influence. As climate variability, land degradation, population change, and market pressures intensify, the functions become more interdependent. Expanding production can affect water, soil, and vegetation; restoration can influence livelihoods and access to resources; and investments in infrastructure and markets can change how land and natural resources are used.

Managing these connections and pressures requires more than technical interventions. It also requires governance arrangements that link decisions, reconcile different interests, and coordinate action across sectors, levels of government, and social groups. Governance encompasses the norms, institutions, and processes through which interests are expressed, responsibilities and resources are distributed, decisions are made, and people participate in and benefit from those decisions. Collaborative governance can help landscape actors address shared priorities that no single institution or community can manage alone.
In Ethiopia, the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program supports landscape actors in the Omo-Ghibe Living Landscape (LL) to strengthen and co-design collaborative governance arrangements. The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT contributes to AoW4: Inclusive Governance Architectures by operationalizing a landscape governance tool in the Omo-Ghibe landscape to support the establishment of a functional, inclusive, and coordinated governance architecture.

The Middle part of the Omo-Ghibe Living Landscape focus area includes four action woredas: Boloso Bombe, Kindo Didaye, Kindo Koysha, and Kawo Koysha. Located mainly in Wolaita in the South Ethiopia Region, the area combines diverse farming systems, strong dependence on natural resources, active local institutions, and significant restoration needs. It also faces challenges such as land degradation, landslides, deforestation, weak market linkages, fragmented value chains, and limited processing and storage capacity. Because decisions in one part of the landscape can affect people and resources elsewhere, a shared understanding of how governance currently works is needed to identify coordination gaps, understand whose voices shape decisions, and determine which capacities may need strengthening.

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT convened a participatory workshop in Wolaita Sodo on September 1 and 2, 2026. The workshop aimed to establish a shared, evidence-informed understanding of governance in the Midland Omo-Ghibe LL and generate evidence to inform the co-design of a functional, inclusive, coordinated, and accountable governance architecture across the four action woredas. It focused on how the existing multi-stakeholder platform and wider governance system connect across the woredas, including how coordination, participation and representation, institutional relationships, and accountability could be strengthened.