Why we fail: stakeholders' perceptions of the social and ecological barriers to reforestation in southern Malawi

Reversing deforestation is a pressing challenge for planetary health and global development, yet the path to restoring forests on a globally significant scale is ill-defined, and government implementation of afforestation projects often generates conflict with user groups. Understanding the needs and values of forest-reliant stakeholders in developing countries and effectively engaging them in forest landscape restoration planning and implementation are critical steps toward meeting afforestation goals, and yet few examples of inclusive participatory processes applied in this context exist. Inspired by an approach used to mediate other natural resource conflicts, I structured a series of stakeholder focus groups in the Zomba-Machinga region of southern Malawi around Systems Thinking and Bayesian Belief Networks. Through these focus groups, I engaged forest-reliant households, academics, and government staff in a participatory process to explore the conditions of past restoration failure...