Archetype Analysis in Sustainability and Land Governance Research

The Working Group on Archetype Analysis in Sustainability and Land Governance Research will advance three priority thematic areas of GLP's Science Plan by providing synthesised insights into archetypes of (un)sustainability related to 'Telecoupling of Land Use Systems', Land Governance' and 'Land Change Trade-Offs for Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity'. It will consolidate archetypes of sustainable land use and governance in order to provide a state-of-the-art knowledge resource to transform land use systems towards sustainability across world regions.

Land systems are fundamental for achieving sustainability transformations at local to global scales. However, knowledge about effective strategies to foster land system transformations remains dispersed among highly contextualised case studies. Archetypes of (un)sustainable land use and governance depict patterns of factors and processes that commonly shape the (un)sustainability of land systems across cases and contexts. The archetypes approach is a methodological approach to generalise knowledge from cases and case studies in context-sensitive ways drawing on a portfolio of methods and design criteria.