Lam, Wai Fung

In this paper, in view of the challenges facing existing integrated landscape approaches (ILAs) to balancing development and conservation, we interrogate the premises of the existing approaches, and suggest commoning as a means to drive mixed-use land development, tackle power imbalances in stakeholder engagement and foster community stewardship. We draw insights from three rural redevelopment cases in rural Hong Kong. Case analysis was performed using the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework to shed light on position rules, boundary rules, and payoff rules and how they affect who can enter what positions and have what rights and responsibilities. Through case comparisons, we find that distinct commoning models led to different levels of mixed-use land development and community stewardship. Both the collaborative governance model and the community land trust model were found to be more effective in safeguarding landscape multifunctionality. The former drove commoning of private lands and the balance of revitalization and conservation goals through policy interventions which provided not only institutional frameworks for public-private partnership but also financial incentives for bottom-up revitalisation and conservation activities. The ecovillage model dealt with a much more homogeneous group who used community land trust as the land tenure arrangement and who also shared similar priorities towards land uses, thus conducive to collective action and self-governance. However, for the agricultural cooperative model, agricultural production was still the primary land use. Moreover, the cases show that institutional innovations on position rules, boundary rules, and pay off rules were key to enabling mixed-use land development and incentivising different levels of community participation depending on the preferences and capacity of community members in landscape stewardship activities. Implications are drawn for further research and practices of integrated landscape approaches.