Governing synergies and trade-offs with SDG15 in Ethiopia: aglobal-to-local study of landscape restoration in Lake Tana sub-basin (PhD project – Dereje Yimam)

The PhD project focuses on the governance of landscape restoration (SDG 15) and its interactions with other SDGs, mainly food security (SDG 2), water (SDG 6), and climate change (SDG 13) from a global to local perspective in the Lake Tana sub-basin of Ethiopia, where agricultural land expansion, fuelwood collection, and overgrazing have led to ongoing deforestation and soil erosion. Land degradation threatens food security and impacts water quantity and quality downstream. Given the interrelated nature of these challenges, the Lake Tana sub-basin serves as an important case study to explore how integrated landscape management and restoration can contribute to achieving multiple SDGs simultaneously and such an approach is connected to decision-making at both national and international levels. The aim of the PhD project is therefore to examine the influence of institutional and actor-based forces on policy change in the global-local nexus of landscape restoration governance and analyze the role of different attributes of multilevel networks in shaping alignment mechanisms between actors, institutions, and policy sectors.

This PhD project starts from the actions of global actors and platforms such as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UN High Level Policy Forum on Sustainable Development in New York, and national climate commitments made under the Paris agreement. It then traces how these actors and policies align with other public and private actors in various centers of governance, including on the national and local level. Specifically, how and to what extent an integrative landscape management and governance is able to address interactions between various SDGs. Ultimately, the project map and trace different forms of alignment between global, national, regional, and local actors and discuss these in the context of the landscape approach.

A mixed research methods will be used to gather both qualitative and quantitative data through a variety of techniques including surveys, expert interviews, stakeholder workshop, and key informant interviews. In addition, secondary data will be collected from policy documents, legal frameworks, reports and different databases. The data will finally be analysed using both statistical analytical tools and qualitative analysis techniques. From this PhD project, four manuscripts will be produced in publishable quality and submitted at peer-reviewed journals by the end of May 2026.