A social-ecological assessment of food security and biodiversity conservation in Ethiopia.

We studied food security and biodiversity conservation from a social-ecological perspective in southwestern Ethiopia. Specialist tree, bird, and mammal species required large, undisturbed forest, supporting the notion of 'land sparing' for conservation. However, our findings also suggest that forest areas should be embedded within a multifunctional landscape matrix (i.e. 'land sharing'), because farmland also supported many species and ecosystem services and was the basis of diversified livelihoods. Diversified livelihoods improved smallholder food security, while lack of access to capital assets and crop raiding by wild forest animals negatively influenced food security. Food and biodiversity governance lacked coordination and was strongly hierarchical, with relatively few stakeholders being highly powerful. Our study shows that issues of livelihoods, access to resources, governance and equity are central when resolving challenges around food security and biodiversity. A multi-facetted, social-ecological approach is better able to capture such complexity than the conventional, two-dimensional land sparing versus sharing framework.

The governance of land use strategies: Institutional and social dimensions of land sparing and land sharing.

Agricultural land use is a key interface between the goals of ensuring food security and protecting biodiversity. "Land sparing" supports intensive agriculture to save land for conservation, whereas "land sharing" integrates production and conservation on the same land. The framing around sparing versus sharing has been extensively debated. Here, we focused on a frequently missing yet crucial component, namely the governance dimension. Through a case-study in Ethiopia, we uncovered stakeholder preferences for sparing versus sharing, the underlying rationale, and implementation capacity challenges. Policy stakeholders preferred sparing whereas implementation stakeholders preferred sharing, which aligned with existing informal institutions. Implementation of both strategies was limited by social, biophysical, and institutional factors. Land use policies need to account for both ecological patterns and social context. The findings from simple analytical frameworks (e.g., sparing vs. sharing) therefore need to be interpreted carefully, and in a social-ecological context, to generate meaningful recommendations for conservation practice.