Participatory theory of change
  • The participatory concept model and strategy development exercise aims to identify the drivers and underlying causes of mangrove loss; and to identify potential strategies/solutions that could be implemented to reduce threats to mangrove and promote sustainable mangrove use.

  • At the end of the exercise the community has developed a concept model. This model depicts the drivers of mangrove loss in their community and the additional factors which contribute to this loss.

  • They identify solutions and work through the activities they need to implement to reach their desired results through a theory of change (ToC).

  • The exercise is carried out with community members in a focus group format development of the concept model and ToC is completed using different coloured paper and chalk.

  • Following the participatory meetings the final concept model with threat ratings, and ToC models are digitized using MiradiTM (2013) software.

  • Announcement of the planning is sent to village leader prior to the exercise;

  • High participation and presence of all stakeholders during the exercise and participants should be fully aware of the purpose of the exercise;

  • The facilitator from the support organization has enough skills and is familiar with the concept model exercise and able to motivate people to express their idea;

  • The support organization is able to adapt to the local context (using the available materials).

To address community reticence and for stronger dialogue within the community, employing two community-based facilitators from the village to assist the Theory of change exercise is recommended. Good practice includes hiring people already engaged in the LMMA management (dina enforcement committee, mangrove commission, women’s group) activities. The community-based facilitators are trained by the technical staff from the support organization in advance of the participatory theory of change exercise. Volunteers from the community should be invited to present the outcome from their group work, aiming to assess the level of consensus on the concept model they developed. It is vital to ensure representation from key stakeholder groups, particularly women and young people who may otherwise be marginalised. If needed, separate women and men in different groups to facilitate open discussion.

Education, awareness, and traditional knowledge documentation

Over the past 10 years, we have focused on assessing the conservation status of endemic species and their rehabilitation in the wild. We have made a great effort to preserve it and plan for its sustainability. The most important thing that my team and I reached is that the surrounding community, users of resources, researchers, and decision-makers, whether in the site or in the government away from the place, the private sector, and students even the public can destroy everything we built during the previous years as a result of their ignorance of what we work and its importance to us and them. Dissemination of information is an external protection shield to ensure the sustainability of activities on the site. Continuous training and awareness activities should be in the target area and throughout the country in order to avoid destruction due to ignorance. Also, not documenting the traditional knowledge inherited by the local community is extremely dangerous and its loss is a waste of wealth that will cost the state and the world huge sums to discover again.

Education, awareness, and documentation, could reduce the current and future pressures and reduce the impact and the cost of recovery.

The most important factor for the success of training and awareness programs is the appropriate choice of the recipient, who preferably has contact, whether from close or from afar, with the natural resource.

 

Involving the community in planning and implementing conservation programs and agreeing on the sustainability and conservation of the natural resource consolidates the principle of partnership and trust and facilitates the process of documenting their knowledge.

Share with the community all your next steps and challenges and hear from them their opinions and suggestions, even if they are simple from your point of view.

Teach children in the region to understand the next generation.

Follow-up and engagement of trainees after training and awareness is very useful and works to establish and implant information within them.

Educate stakeholders about the importance of your role for their future and share the decision with them.

Involvement of Local Community in conservation Planning

The local communities that are located inside Protected Area suffer from some restrictions on the use of natural resources, which they believe are their property and right, and that they are the people of the place before the establishment of the PA. Usually, restrictions on the use of natural resources are for the purpose of protection and reducing pressures, which may affect the livelihood of some members of the local community, which they consider a process of denial of their rights. The local community owns cultural wealth that has been passed down from generation to generation on the optimal use of resources, their protection, and their propagation in simple ways. Involving that community in planning processes to protect natural resources will remove many of the penalties, whether for the management of the PA or for the community itself. Traditional knowledge is a hidden treasure that can be used to improve the state of natural resources and enhance the local community's sense of ownership and importance in protecting its resources, which will support the sustainability process and reduce disturbances

Those in charge of the selection process should map the community’s priorities in this area and points of contention, and identify influential community leaders, heard and loved by their community.

Several initial meetings should be held with community leaders, discussing them and asking for their support to mobilize community participation.

We should go to them in their areas and hold community assembly meetings to elect local representatives to coordinate conservation program activities

We learned that the local community and its traditional knowledge is a scientific wealth that should never be wasted.

The process of selecting representatives of the local community should be considered carefully, taking into account the conflict between tribes and avoiding the involvement of two dissenting parties.

Alternative opportunities must be provided when the community is prevented from some of its activities for the purpose of conservation

They should be made aware that they have the power to decide and allow communities to prioritize and select quick-impact projects to strengthen support and stimulate local participation.

Improve Knowledge about target species

Having valid and up-to-date information on the ecological and conservation status of threatened species is one of the most important elements in the establishment of an effective conservation program. Collecting data about the current geographical range, population characteristics, threats, ecology, and habitat in which species occur will help t determine the suitable habitat for the most effective rehabilitation process. The IUCN Red List is one of the most important tools and indicators for determining the conservation status of biological diversity in the world. As well as Species Distribution Models (SDMs) in determining the potentially suitable habitat for target species.

To achieve the most accurate results from this block, you must conduct a comprehensive survey of all previous studies and identify the gaps and work to fill them in simple and available ways. You must plan how the data will be collected and the scenarios where it will not be able to obtain. Your team must be trained on how to collect data and standardize methods. Pay attention to cleaning the data before using it in the analysis. Careful review by individuals outside the team to ensure its accuracy

Reviewing what was done previously and making a plan and alternatives before going to the field is one of the most important factors to save time and to get the goal

Financing Tree Nurseries

The trees that HAF with community partners grow from seeds in nurseries in Morocco are generators of direct revenue from the a) sale of the trees at a subsidized rate to farmers, cooperatives, associations, and education centers, and b) voluntary and credited carbon offsets that are secured with HAF’s monitoring system of the trees that are transplanted from the nurseries, integrating and maximizing the benefits from remote sensing and ground-truthing with community engagement. The sale of carbon credits, in particular, ensures maximum impact - revenue generated by the trees planted is reinvested directly into the communities that grow the trees. 

In 2006, HAF established its first community nursery. Since then, HAF has been lent land without cost by the public agencies. HAF first developed regional agreements for land with the Department of Water and Forests, the Ministries of Education and Youth & Sports, universities, the Moroccan Jewish Community, and cooperatives. They are now extending more land to HAF for nurseries. This is key in allowing HAF to provide trees to farmers at subsidized costs so that they may benefit more fully from the future income of the trees they plant. 

 

 

By gathering data on social benefits related to trees planted, carbon credits can be sold based on not only the environmental benefits but social impact as well. In addition, trainings in local communities are vital for giving members the tools, resources, and confidence to pursue their goals - which often tend to relate to income generation. However, beyond knowledge and skills-building training, cooperative members need guidance on how to utilize not only already-existing resources but also how to collaborate for shared benefit. Participatory planning meetings allow participants to identify common needs and share experiences. By encouraging members of different cooperatives and commuities within one municipality or province to develop a supportive network through the participatory approach, projects such as tree planting can go further in achieving its objectives.

Solar lightning kits

Combines solar solution to provide ligth and access to power and charge phones 

Solar kits 

Financial resources 

Logistics 

Improve life in rural commnities 

 

Niassa biogas project

Build partnership to implement projects in biogas in niassa reserve and other reserves in Mozambique

Finance

Logistic 

Capacity building 

Sustainable development 

Building block 1: Gender-differentiated vulnerability assessment

This vulnerability assessment methodology allows for the accurate targeting of nature-based solutions to critical areas of need in cities and sectors of the population. It specifically includes a gender focus to ensure that adaptation efforts take into account how climate change affects women differently than men, given their varying roles in society. The vulnerability studies allow identifying the areas of greatest danger from weather-related events (such as landslides, floods, etc.) based on the exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the analyzed territory. They are carried out through participatory processes with communities and key stakeholders and climatic scenarios that integrate climatic, environmental and socioeconomic variables at the same time. The analysis also allows estimating the risk of loss of ecosystem services and therefore the potential needs for adaptation to climate change. This exercise is the basis for designing and implementing nature-based solutions to strengthen the resilience of communities in urban and peri-urban systems. Finally, this process builds a sense of co-ownership and relationships for partnerships to carry out the project.

One of the main conditions needed for this building block’s success is the inclusion and approval of local communities and key stakeholders within those communities and their respective governments. Additionally, strong sources of climate and hydrological data facilitate this analysis process greatly.

A key aspect of this block is access to data. For example, Mexico has abundant meteorological and hydrological data while El Salvador does not. This allowed for a much more thorough climate change scenario in the former case. In terms of the consultation process, capturing perceived risk, in addition to modeled risks, is key for developing targeted activities where they are most needed. In that process, including women through the gender-differentiated approach also contributes to better targeted adaptation efforts by successfully identifying socially vulnerable populations. During this vulnerability assessment, capacity building is essential to ensure that communities and policy makers can interpret and use the assessments subsequently.

Addressing power dynamics and promoting engagement in collective action

These three decision-making tools were crucial to address power dynamics and promote stakeholders' participation and engagement in collective action in the National Park:

  • An analytical tool to characterize types of governance arrangements in the protected area. Formal and informal governance arrangements were classified in terms of stakeholders’ responsibility (shared vs. concentrated) and influence (equal vs. unequal) into four types: prescriptive, informative, consultative, and cooperative. By applying this tool in the National Park we identified challenges for more socially inclusive conservation while enhancing existing participatory mechanisms and delineating new ones;
  • Theatre-based facilitation techniques to address power dynamics between stakeholders. By using them in a virtual workshop, participants deliberated on their roles and power relations around conservation governance and how these may be reconciled to improve collaboration;
  • A context-specific boundary object to facilitate collective action for conservation governance. Using this graphical tool in a workshop, participants assessed their level of willingness to put several strategies into practice. The tool visualized the results graphically as a proxy of the potential willingness to move from theory to practice.
  • The analytical tool to characterize governance arrangements requires data collection about the existing decision-making mechanisms behind each arrangement identified, the stakeholders engaged and how they are engaged;
  • The art-based approaches and context-specific boundary object require a process based on co-learning and knowledge co-production approaches through which stakeholders deliberate on power dynamics, conservation challenges and define collaborative strategies to address them.
  • Analyzing both formal and informal-based governance arrangements serves as a means to understand how participation in conservation decision-making is actually shaped within protected areas governance and how to improve stakeholder engagement given the context;
  • It is important to consider informal governance mechanisms to understand potential trade-offs because they can lead to both positive and negative outcomes for conservation;
  • Stakeholders’ responsibility and influence are key analytical axes to delineate participatory mechanisms in order to identify opportunities for more socially inclusive conservation;
  • Art-based methods are useful to incorporate power relations aspects into conservation debates;
  • Elucidating unequal relations for conservation governance offers opportunities to clarify stakeholders’ roles and their responsibilities and facilitate a better understanding of how these may be reconciled to improve collaboration;
  • The assessment of stakeholders’ willingness to be involved in putting the strategies into practice is a crucial factor to guide collective action.
Elucidating visions and future scenarios for park management

These three tools help to identify visions and elaborate future scenarios, in a participatory way, for protected areas management:

  • Participatory mapping (PGIS), a tool to visualize information in a particular geographical context focusing on a certain issue of interest. This tool was used in surveys to elicit the residents’ visions based on perceptions of landscape values and local knowledge;
  • Streamline, an open-source narrative synthesis tool that integrates graphics in the form of canvases and tiles, facilitating interviews and discussion groups in a creative and stimulating way. Streamline was used with stakeholders’ expressing their values and preferences for management actions, and sharing their knowledge of changes in the landscape;
  • Participatory scenario planning exercise, a deliberative process that was facilitated about plausible and desired futures through a two-day online workshop (due to the Covid-19 pandemic) with stakeholders. Based on the current socio-ecological conditions and the factors driving change, participants weighed up what could happen in the coming 20 years, discussed implications for biodiversity conservation and the quality of life of those who currently enjoy the ecosystem services it provides, whilst identifying the strategies to address them.
  • Inviting and giving voice to stakeholder groups that are often poorly included in social spaces to publicly debate about conservation;
  • Creating a collaborative process built upon dissent-based approaches to promote a transparent and horizontal work-space;
  • Building workgroups with a balanced representation between stakeholder groups, regions of the residence and gender, helps so that not only majoritarian voices are heard.
  • Local facilitators and collaborators were essential to approach a big sample of local residents in the surveys and the workshop;   
  • Online processes require significant efforts and human resources to handle multiple platforms and technical issues simultaneously. Specific expert facilitation skills are required;
  • Scenario planning methodologies should more strongly consider different potential disturbances and how drivers of change in the near and far future can be affected by wildcard events such as a pandemic.