Testing and improving the 8R framework of responsible land management to assess major land interventions

Integrated land and water management often requires land and water interventions, which can have different, mostly contextual, justifications. In order to both highlight the specific nature of contextual characteristics but also provide a general framework to assess the interventions, the 8R framework of responsible land management was designed. The 8R framework of responsible land management can assess both the extent to which potential land interventions are responsible and the variations in degrees to which past interventions are developing towards a situation whereby both stakeholders and beneficiaries acknowledged that it is sufficiently and appropriately responsible. The 8R framework contains 8 aspects which collectively represent responsible land management (responsiveness, robustness, respectedness, recognizability, resilience, reliability, reflexiveness, and retraceability) and 3 assessment components which represent operational executions of interventions (structure, processes and outcomes). The framework can derive both quantitative and qualitative indicators on where, how, when and to which extent land interventions are responsible or not. This article reviews three types of major interventions that change land rights, land use and land values, and tests how and under which conditions the 8R framework could be beneficial. The types of interventions include the development of new airports, the construction of bridges and the design of new capital cities. The experiences with these different types of interventions show that the framework is useful to generate an overall picture of the degree to which any land intervention is responsible which is more land-specific than other frameworks, as it presents a multidimensional assessment. Still there is room for improvement. Despite the systematic prompts designed to qualify and quantify the respective aspects, the use of some of the aspects still appear ambiguous or confusing for practitioners. Furthermore, in the evaluation of components there is a need to differentiate between outcomes and impacts. Finally yet importantly, the overall metric of the 8R framework still needs a better and more direct coupling with policy interventions. Further research in this direction is therefore underway.