This Frontiers’ article proposes developing an integrated assessment toolkit for environmental governance in overlooked grasslands and savannahs in the Global South. Systems-thinking approaches offer frameworks and methodologies to explore the complexity of social-ecological systems, unveiling institutional aspects and causal variables in resource management. Reliance on a single framework limits comprehensive understanding, highlighting the need for more social science knowledge and context-specific frameworks for policy settings. Building on community-based governance (CBG) and key frameworks like community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and the institutional analysis and development framework (IAD), the article proposes a theory-based toolkit.

This toolkit reviews, synthesizes, and tests core principles to better account for social-ecological interactions. Future research can generate testable hypotheses in real-life contexts, guided by suggested research questions, methods, and comparable cases.