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Addressing ecosystem destruction and unsustainable development requires appropriate frameworks to comprehensively investigate social-ecological systems. Focusing on woody plant management in southwestern Ethiopia, we combined social-ecological resilience and a leverage points perspective to (1) assess how stakeholders perceive and operationalize resilience principles; (2) investigate resilience challenges and solutions across different levels of systemic depth; and (3) assess how different stakeholder groups noted challenges and solutions at different levels of system depth. Data were collected in focus group discussions with multiple types of stakeholders and analyzed via quantitative content and descriptive analysis. All stakeholder groups identified two principles currently applied in the landscape, while other principles were not currently applied widely. In total, we identified 37 challenges and 44 solutions to resilience, mainly focused on “deeper” systemic change. This trend was noted across stakeholder groups, but particularly by local people. Based on our work, we suggest to foster bottom-up changes in system goals, rules, paradigms, and intent, drawing explicitly on local people and their knowledge. More broadly, we suggest that further research on combining social-ecological resilience and leverage points perspectives could be helpful to better navigate and transform social-ecological systems.

Forest decline and degradation are particularly high in the tropics and pose a risk to those who depend on forest resources. The in-migration of smallholders to forest frontiers can fuel transitions of livelihoods and land and resource use. However, the conditions under which in-migration contributes to such transitions remain poorly understood. With this study, we aim to investigate the influence of in-migration, together with other non-demographic factors, on the livelihoods of local and migrant communities. As a case study, we chose the Guraferda district, a hotspot of rural in-migration and forest loss in southwest Ethiopia, where the forest-based local population experienced a rapid transition to agriculture-based livelihoods. We used 224 household surveys in three different kebeles (smallest administrative unit in Ethiopia) and applied descriptive and analytical statistics to understand how and why the forest activities of local and migrant groups have changed since a major resettlement program was launched in 2003. The findings were contextualized by local expert knowledge to assess forest loss and the role of in-migration in livelihood transitions and deforestation. Forest cover in Guraferda declined partially because of the in-migration of smallholders from agricultural-based systems, and insecure land tenure, but also considerably because of the expansion of commercial agriculture. With the decline in forest, the local population adopted migrants’ agricultural practices, a trend further encouraged by agricultural policies and barriers to participation in forest management for locals. Our study challenges simplified assumptions in in-migration–deforestation debates by showing that governmental policies, land tenure, and natural-resource access are mediating the impact of migration on livelihood transitions and deforestation. We conclude that securing land tenure and equal access to natural resources for frontier residents and promoting a mix of agricultural and forest livelihood activities can reduce adverse impacts in in-migration areas.

Social-ecological systems are complex and involve uncertainties emerging from interactions between biophysical and social system components. In the face of growing complexity and uncertainty, stakeholder engagement with the future is important to proactively manoeuvre toward desirable outcomes. Focusing on the interrelated challenges of food security and biodiversity conservation, we conducted a participatory scenario planning exercise in a rural landscape in southwestern Ethiopia. We involved 35 stakeholder organizations in multiple workshops to construct causal loop diagrams, elicit critical uncertainties, and draft scenario narratives. Jointly, we developed four plausible future scenarios for the studied landscape: (1) gain over grain: local cash crops; (2) mining green gold: coffee investors; (3) coffee and conservation: a biosphere reserve; and (4) food first: intensive farming and forest protection. These scenarios differ with respect to their main social-economic dynamics as well as their food security and biodiversity outcomes. Importantly, three of the four scenarios, i.e., all except "coffee and conservation: a biosphere reserve," focused on increasing efficiency in agricultural production through intensification, specialization, and market integration. In contrast, "coffee and conservation: a biosphere reserve" was driven by agroecological production methods that support diversified livelihoods, a multifunctional landscape, maintenance of natural capital, a governance system that supports local people, and social-ecological resilience. Similar agroecological trajectories have been advocated as desirable for sustainable development in numerous other smallholder farming systems worldwide. Given fewer trade-offs and better equity outcomes, it appears that an agroecological development pathway stands a good chance of generating synergies between food security and biodiversity conservation. Pathways prioritizing agricultural efficiency, in contrast, are more likely to degrade natural capital and cause social inequity.

Farmers' practices in the management of agricultural landscapes influence biodiversity with implications for livelihoods, ecosystem service provision, and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we examined how smallholding farmers in an agriculture-forest mosaic landscape in southwestern Ethiopia manage trees and forests with regard to a few selected ecosystem services and disservices that they highlighted as "beneficial" or "problematic." Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from six villages, located both near and far from forest, using participatory field mapping and semistructured interviews, tree species inventory, focus group discussions, and observation. The study showed that farmers' management practices, i.e., the planting of trees on field boundaries amid their removal from inside arable fields, preservation of trees in semimanaged forest coffee, maintenance of patches of shade coffee fields in the agricultural landscape, and establishment of woodlots with exotic trees result in a restructuring of the forest-agriculture mosaic. In addition, the strategies farmers employed to mitigate crop damage by wild mammals such as baboons and bush pigs, e.g., migration and allocation of migrants on lands along forests, have contributed to a reduction in forest and tree cover in the agricultural landscape. Because farmers' management practices were overall geared toward mitigating the negative impact of disservices and to augment positive services, we conclude that it is important to operationalize ecosystem processes as both services and disservices in studies related to agricultural landscapes.