Why we fail: Stakeholders' perceptions of the social and ecological barriers to reforestation in southern Malawi

Abstract Reversing deforestation is a pressing challenge for planetary health and global development, but the path to restoring forests on a globally significant scale is ill‐defined, and government implementation of afforestation projects often generates conflict with user groups. Understanding the needs and values of forest‐reliant stakeholders in developing countries and effectively engaging them in forest landscape restoration planning and implementation are critical steps towards meeting afforestation goals, and yet few examples of practical methods to include the poor in participatory environmental governance processes exist. Inspired by an approach used to mediate other natural resource conflicts, I structured a series of stakeholder focus groups in the Zomba–Machinga region of southern Malawi around Systems Thinking and Bayesian Belief Networks. Through these focus groups, I engaged forest‐reliant households, academics and government staff in a participatory process to explore the conditions of past restoration failure; identify the barriers to future reforestation success; and develop proposed solutions. Out of eight focus groups held, seven viewed poverty as the single greatest obstacle to afforestation success, and all seven perceived small business capacity building as one of the three most important factors in poverty alleviation, followed in order of frequency by improved agricultural practices (six of seven groups), and non‐forest employment (three of seven groups). If each focus group could successfully implement the three factors they considered most important, the groups' perceptions that poverty could be alleviated ranged from a likelihood of 15.8%–62.3%, with differences among focus groups that underscored inequities in social agency and vocational opportunities of the participants based on age and gender. This study illustrates where these diverse groups of stakeholders from a single region converge and diverge in their thinking, underscoring the importance of establishing durable participatory processes to work through conflicts, nurture trust and collaboratively develop solutions that are relevant to local conditions in order for global forest landscape restoration to succeed. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.