Governance as Infrastructure: Unlocking Regenerative Landscape Investment.

About the session Climate change is increasing the risks facing communities, ecosystems, and the people trying to invest in them. Across a single landscape, those risks are rarely isolated. Water, agriculture, forests, biodiversity, livelihoods, land rights, and local economies interact with one another. Decisions made upstream affect communities downstream. Conservation choices influence livelihoods. Agricultural practices shape water availability. Investments in one part of a landscape can create consequences somewhere else. Yet finance and development programs are often designed one project, sector, or organization at a time. Integrated landscape approaches offer a different model: bringing communities, governments, investors, businesses, civil society, and other actors together to make decisions around the landscape as a connected system. That coordination can strengthen community resilience. It can also make investment less risky. But governance does not happen for free. Building trusted relationships takes time. Convening different interests requires people and institutions. Communities need the capacity to participate meaningfully. Conflicts have to be navigated. Decisions need processes that people recognize as legitimate. And somebody has to pay for that infrastructure before an investment becomes viable. This creates an important question for landscape finance: if good governance helps de-risk investment, who should pay for the governance that makes investment possible? This session will move beyond the theory of integrated landscapes and into the economics of making them work. What does landscape governance actually cost in real-world settings? Which elements are essential? Who currently pays for them? How does stronger governance change the risk profile for investors? And can we make the economic case for financing governance itself as part of the infrastructure required for resilient landscapes? What to expect A practical conversation grounded in real-world landscape experience. Participants will examine examples of integrated landscape approaches to understand how governance works in practice, what it costs, and where stronger coordination between communities, governments, civil society, donors, and investors has changed what becomes possible. The conversation will connect two groups that do not always start from the same place: people focused on community and landscape governance, and people focused on deploying capital. Rather than treating governance as an administrative overhead, the session will ask whether it should be understood as part of the infrastructure that makes resilient landscape investment possible. Who this is for This session is for landscape practitioners, community and Indigenous organizations, conservation and development organizations, governments, philanthropists, donors, impact investors, nature finance practitioners, and anyone trying to understand how better governance can strengthen community resilience while making landscape investment more viable. What you will get out of it Real-world examples of how integrated landscape governance works in practice A clearer understanding of what effective landscape governance actually costs Insight into how governance can reduce risks for communities and investors A framework for thinking about governance as investable infrastructure rather than simply overhead Practical questions for investors, donors, governments, and practitioners about who should finance the systems that make landscape investment possible