How to Know if Land Management is Responsible? Evaluating the 8R Framework of Responsible Land Management

Abstract

The article of de Vries & Chigbu (2017) presented for the first time a design of a generic methodological framework to evaluate responsible land management, later referred to as the 8R framework of responsible land management. Whilst a number of subsequent publications (Babalola et al., 2022;de Vries & Rudiarto, 2023) have since used this framework in different ways, a main critique of this original paper is that the article does not specify the practical procedure and the associated empirical measures or indicators for each of the 8 Rs to derive a conclusive and concrete finding and judgment if a land management project would be sufficiently or appropriately responsible. Instead, the methodology in the article only provides suggestions on starting with the framework and then defining it using your own qualitative or quantitative indicators, which collectively should lead to some judgment. A second point of critique is that while the framework defines eight concepts, there is the underlying assumption that the variability of each of those concepts is relevant to describing and measuring a degree of responsibility. Moreover, the main assumption is that any land management project is pluriform and dynamic, making any responsibility assessment also dynamic and pluriform.Nevertheless, the basic justification for introducing the framework was that most other land management frameworks tended to examine institutional and operational indicators at national levels Commentary