Toolkit for the application of Green Negotiated Territorial Development (GreeNTD)

The GreeNTD (Green Negotiated Territorial Development) is an approach to land use planning based on a socio-ecological territorial development methodology that supports wide stakeholders engagement in seeking progressive territorial consensus through a holistic, bottom-up and negotiated vision. Its objective is to get an agreed, socially legitimate and sustainable use and management of natural resources whilst safeguarding the ecosystem, current and future. The GreeNTD framework is built on the following guiding principles: inclusiveness of all stakeholders, multi-disciplinarity  to encompass all main dimensions, visions and perceptions of territory, negotiation between stakeholders, gender focus and inclusion of vulnerable groups, iterative decision-making, and scalability to accommodate local, sub-national and national interests.The key methodological steps of the approach are:

(1) setting the agenda for the process;

(2) understanding the stakeholders and the territory as a socio-ecological system;

(3) outlining coherent and feasible proposals for the development of the territory;

(4) seeking a consensus for a Socio-Ecological Territorial Agreement (SETA);

(5) preparing the ground to guarantee the application of SETA;

(6)  monitoring and evaluation.

The proposed methods and tools are to be used not as recipes but rather as a set of various methodological options and examples of tools that can support the process.