Explore how the EU REDD Facility is pioneering a jurisdictional PPP approach to promote sustainable and legal oil palm production in South Sumatra. Learn about the challenges, strategies, and expected impact on deforestation reduction and climate change targets.
Discover how jurisdictional approaches developed by/in regions of Côte d’Ivoire can be a game changer, fostering coordination among stakeholders to address environmental issues and promote sustainable commodity production.
The EU REDD Facility’s project in Côte d’Ivoire aims to overcome challenges in forest restoration through participatory land-use planning and securing land tenure. It focuses on developing village-level land-use planning methods to achieve a balance between agriculture and forestry. It also targets the gender-oriented delivery of land certificates on 2500 hectares of forest areas.
The briefing identifies gaps within the production of forest-risk commodities in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. It proposes a stakeholder engagement plan to promote a sustainability approach to managing coffee production.
In October 2022, the European Forest Institute (EFI) and the Provincial Project Management Unit of Lam Dong Province hosted a Land-use Planner training course in Da Lat City, Vietnam. The event welcomed 32 participants from Lam Dong and Dak Nong Provinces, including members from several People’s Committees, the Department of Agricultural and Rural Development and of Natural Resources and Environment, and non-governmental organisations.
The training course was participatory and trainee-centred, with participants encouraged to engage actively in learning activities using real-life situations. Three project teams shared their experiences in learning how to use the Land-use Planner to support sustainable agricultural and land-use planning.
A group of various actors from diverse sectors and fields, including local officials doing cadastral work at the commune level, joined the training from Dak Nong. They used official statistics and local knowledge from real experiences in their commune to develop different land-use scenarios. These included:
Some in the group spend most of their daily work carrying out on-site visits and communicating with local residents at those sites. Many noted the usefulness and practicality of the Land-use Planner as a tool to support better discussions with stakeholders in the field.
“This tool suits my work well and is helping to support farmers in my area.”
A cadastral official from Dak Nong
Source: Q-Huong Le, MDRI, 2022
Located in Quang Son Commune, Dak G’long District, Dak Nong Province, DANOFARM is a cooperative with members from diverse ethnic groups, many of whom are women. The cooperative aims to promote traditional handicrafts and local agricultural products like Robusta coffee.
As Ms Ta Thi Lien, Director of DANOFARM, explained, despite the high quality of their coffee products, it is hard for DANOFARM to find markets for their coffee. This is because the cooperative is limited in resources and technical capacity for market promotion and competition.
Ms Lien participated in the Land-use Planner training course and tested DANOFARM’s business data to develop some practical agricultural production scenarios. Based on DANOFARM’s current and prospective business practice, she tested three scenarios:
Her participation provided a practical perspective in discussions with participants from the public sector.
Apart from local stakeholders, the Land-use Planner training course also welcomed a technical expert from the Global Coffee Platform – Mr Mai Xuan Thong. Mr Thong has previously used the Land-use Planner and other similar modelling tools. Coupled with his rich experience in coffee production techniques, he offered valuable support and insights while facilitating group discussions.
During the training course, Mr Thong collaborated with a group of participants from Di Linh to develop scenarios for the district. Their scenarios explored increasing forest, rice and coffee plantation areas to exploit fallow and unused land areas.
From Mr Thong’s perspective, the Land-use Planner can be a valuable tool for a multitude of users, at diverse scales and with varying aims, from cooperatives or even family farms up to large-scale planning processes. The tool and its outputs can help stakeholders find a balance between agricultural production and forest ecosystem-based services.
Participants from the Central Highlands of Vietnam explored the various ways the Land-use Planner could support sustainable land-use planning in their areas and meet a range of needs. Bringing together a diverse set of stakeholders from the government, private sector and civil society, the training helped to establish a Land-use Planner community of practice in Vietnam, and users can continue to exchange on using data and modelling future scenarios to inform land-use strategies.
Nguyen Que Huong Le
Research analyst
Mekong Development Research Institute
The EU and other countries are developing measures aimed at curbing deforestation and forest degradation driven by the expansion of agricultural land used to produce commodities such as beef, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy and wood. In addition, consumers increasingly want to know that goods and products they buy are produced without harming people or the environment. But how can we ensure legal and sustainable value chains that unleash local wellbeing and protect forest and biodiversity without excluding smallholders? The answer may be in the mixing of six ingredients to whip up successful multistakeholder partnerships that can support legal and sustainable supply chains of forest-risk commodities.
Partnerships are at the heart of what we do at the EU REDD Facility. We work collaboratively with a broad range of stakeholders in the public and private sectors to develop innovative solutions and approaches. Our aim is to improve land-use governance and reduce pressures on forests in commodity-producing countries across Africa, Asia and South America.
Partnerships were a recurring theme at the recent 15th World Forestry Congress, which took place from 2 to 6 May 2022 in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The Congress concluded with the adoption of the Seoul Forest Declaration, which outlines six priority actions. The first of these actions is a call for sharing and integrating “the responsibility over forests […] across institutions, sectors and stakeholders in order to achieve a sustainable future”, given that “forests transcend political, social and environmental boundaries and are vital for biodiversity and the carbon, water and energy cycles at a planetary scale.”
During the Congress, together with RECOFTC, we organised a side-event that focused on ‘forests without boundaries.’ Titled “Innovative partnerships to promote legal and sustainable forest-risk commodities,” the side-event featured five panellists of diverse backgrounds. They explored key success factors and lessons learnt from various multistakeholder partnerships aimed at supporting legal and sustainable supply chains of forest-risk commodities. The event also built on the EU REDD Facility’s experience, including its Transparency Pathway, which charts six pragmatic steps to make collaboration between public and private supply chain actors more impactful and inclusive, while reducing costs and gaining positive visibility in global commodity markets.
The event identified the following six ingredients to concoct successful partnerships to promote legal and sustainable supply chains of forest-risk commodities.
Regardless of the level and scope of the partnerships, they must be built upon an open, equal and fair dialogue. The actors enter the dialogue willingly as they see the benefits they can draw from being part of such partnerships. Chay Senkhammoungkhoun, Project Field Coordinator at RECOFTC, often facilitates village-level dialogues on land and commodity governance between local communities and the private sector in Lao PDR. He noted that because actors have different needs and interests, they must be ready to “give” and “take” during the negotiations.
All panellists highlighted the importance of trust as the main ingredient of a successful partnership. Such trust is built upon a shared understanding among actors of the partnership’s objectives and vision.
Further, partnerships require a clear structure, in which each actor is aware of its role and responsibility. As an example, Karina Barrera, Undersecretary of Climate Change, Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition of Ecuador, cited the ProAmazonia programme in Ecuador. She explained how the government can demonstrate leadership by coordinating the planning, implementation and monitoring of sustainable supply-chain programmes at various governance levels.
Another trust enhancer is transparency in communication with partners about expectations and actions. Existing information and transparency instruments in the context of the supply chains of forest-risk commodities, such as Trase, can create a more efficient partnership.
All panellists agreed that the process should not exclude any important stakeholder group, and that often underrepresented groups, such as smallholders, indigenous peoples, local communities, and women, must be meaningfully involved in the partnership. However, an inclusive partnership requires some legwork.
Doreen Asumang-Yeboah, Natural Resource Governance Practitioner from Ghana, has been active in the Ghanaian civil society space for over a decade. She reminded the audience that stakeholder mapping is crucial. Stakeholder groups, such as the private sector or local communities, are composed of people with different aspirations. Understanding these nuances ─and the societal context─ is key to ensure true inclusiveness.
Further, additional support to ensure effective participation of underrepresented groups might be needed, for example in the form of capacity building. Sufficient funding for this is thus important.
Incentives are key to sustain the partnership in the long run. Tran Quynh Chi, Regional Director Asia Landscape, IDH, who has the experience of developing multistakeholder partnerships in the agricultural sector in various landscapes and jurisdictions throughout Asia, highlighted the importance of finding a business case for each of the involved stakeholders. Economic and trade incentives are especially useful to make partnerships palatable to many actors across the commodity supply chains, in both producing and consuming countries.
All types of incentives need to be clarified and optimised over time as part of creating and strengthening enabling environments. As noted by Karina Barrera from Ecuador, the government plays an important role. For example, at the subnational level, the government can coordinate jurisdictional deforestation-free programme involving all partners. The coordination includes connecting producers with potential buyers or off-takers and with the financial sector or donors. Further, the government at various levels provides the regulatory and institutional frameworks, in addition to promoting the progress achieved.
Mathis Freytag, Advisor, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), emphasised that there is no need to reinvent the wheel when a new partnership is developed. For example, an existing multistakeholder platform might be repurposed to meet new partnership objectives, especially if it works well and includes all key actors. For many of these actors, continuing and building upon what works is preferable, as it is more efficient and cost-effective.
At the very least, new partnerships must leverage success recipes from past and existing partnerships. In the context of international partnerships to promote deforestation-free supply chains, lessons learnt from the timber sector, especially from the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) processes of the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT), can inform potential partnerships focusing on other forest-risk commodities.
All panellists underscored that partnerships are not built overnight. Building trust and effective partnerships that don’t go stale takes a lot of time, patience and hard work. All partners must therefore be aware of the various limitations when setting up a partnership and adjust their expectations accordingly. Thus, the timeline must be realistically developed starting from the planning stage.
As we enter our second decade, we at the EU REDD Facility continue to mix and blend these six ingredients of successful partnerships. They form part of the recipe for innovative and collaborative approaches and solutions to advance our partner countries’ forest and land-use governance and development goals. We invite all interested partners to exchange further ideas on multistakeholder partnerships to support legal and sustainable supply chains of forest-risk commodities.
On 2 May 2022, as part of the XV World Forestry Congress, the EU REDD Facility and RECOFTC will co-host a hybrid side-event. The side-event will show how improved accessibility and transparency of information along complex commodity supply chains can help improve governance, build trust among trade partners, and support accountability. It will explore how to achieve this while ensuring that smallholders, local communities, and indigenous peoples can benefit from international trade.
At the COP26 Indonesia Pavilion on 8 November, European Forest Institute (EFI) expert Thomas Sembres presented ideas on promoting sustainable trade through transparency and traceability in forest, agriculture commodities and trade. Speaking at the Indonesian Pavilion, Sembres made the case for raising the visibility of sustainability, and for creating more differentiation in global markets between what is sustainable and what is not. This needs to be done at scale for mainstream markets, he said, “not just for the niche markets of certified or premium products.”
While more robust traceability systems are needed as a support to more visibility for sustainability, they will not be enough unless accompanied by broader access to information, said Sembres. “Most traceability systems that exist nowadays are non-transparent traceability systems. This means that most market actors don’t have access to this information and cannot use it to promote sustainable production and trade.”
Bringing transparency to a traceability system is a delicate task, he said, with some actors fearing that more accessible information would be used against them. “At EFI we are working on this delicate task of helping governments use supply chain transparency to encourage progress towards sustainability.”
On the question of bridging differences between producer countries and consumer countries related to transparency and traceability systems, Sembres confirmed that more data was now available than ever before – but said that dialogue between market actors or between governments remained difficult. The key reason for this gap are the complexity of numerous data and traceability platforms, he said, along with distrust around the use of the data.
What is needed now, Sembres said, is simplicity and trust based on transparency and inclusive, structured and equitable processes on choice of data sources and data use. The experience of Terpercaya was a good example of how this could be achieved, he said.
“We need to build supply chains of understanding and trust. The Transparency Pathway is a way to bring public and private supply chain actors together to shift mainstream commodity markets towards sustainability.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on the environment. As resources for forest management decline, risks of criminal activity such as illegal logging have escalated. At the same time, many cooperation projects aimed at reducing deforestation or improving biodiversity conservation have suffered delays and breaks in their activities.
For those working on environmental solutions – including the EU REDD Facility – the pandemic has required creativity and resourcefulness. Not only must workflows be maintained while at a distance, but tangible results need to be generated for those who were vulnerable even before the pandemic.
In a new blog, REDD expert Frédéric Baron shares lessons from Colombia, Ecuador and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), making the case that “now more than ever we see the need for well-informed and open dialogue, and processes for facilitation”.
Facilitators and facilitation skills are necessary for achieving sustainable development goals and Nationally Determined Contributions targets, says Baron. “With or without a pandemic, environmental and social challenges cannot wait until ‘normality’ returns.”
For support to Colombia, Ecuador and the DRC in 2021, the EU REDD Facility has opted to increase the facilitation component of its work. Information is shared to generate common knowledge, and then to identify potential solutions for improving governance and sustainability of land use.
The overarching lesson of the past 18 months has been that negotiations, dialogue, and consensus can be achieved if a facilitating third party ensures a first layer of knowledge and understanding, says Baron. “It does not mean that the way towards a final agreement will be easy, but certainly easier and possible.”
When the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a pandemic, I was in Bogota on a work mission, living the last moments of what some could now consider a “normal” professional life. I returned home to Barcelona early and impassively observed how the world was dramatically changing, with a feeling of being useless in the crisis and disrupted in my personal work. Since then, the pandemic has harshly impacted all populations around the globe, in terms of health, of course, but also economically and socially.
We cannot overlook the impact of the pandemic on the environment too, and the management of natural resources. In Colombia, of the 62 protected areas that fall under the National System of Protected Areas, 25 were engaged in ecotourism, as were 33 of the 59 protected natural areas in Ecuador. Their financial sustainability has been affected as national and international public investments were diverted towards managing the pandemic. There’s now a rising risk of criminal activity such as illegal logging, as resources for forest management decrease and ranger patrols are suspended. At the same time, a lot of cooperation projects aimed at reducing deforestation or improving biodiversity conservation have suffered delays and breaks in their activities.
Most actors and experts involved in these programmes or working on environmental solutions – including the EU REDD Facility – need to work at a distance, and mostly from home. For everyone in this field, this situation has required creativity, not just to maintain workflows but also to generate tangible results for those who were vulnerable even before the pandemic. As an expert working in international cooperation, this panorama has forced me to reconsider and rethink the modalities and methodologies of our day-to-day work.
One of the biggest personal lessons of these challenging last 18 months has been the urgency of reconnecting actors and stakeholders that are more isolated than ever. Facilitators and/or facilitation skills are greatly necessary if we want to make 2021 and years ahead not “lost years”, but “opportunistic or transition years” in achieving sustainable development goals and Nationally Determined Contributions targets. With or without a pandemic, environmental and social challenges cannot wait until “normality” returns.
Another lesson has been the potential for information technology and virtual connections. The pandemic accelerated a major modern phenomenon: the rise of the virtual. We have all experienced the massive improvement and democratisation of social media and internet technologies, allowing us to connect and exchange information faster, from long distance, and at any time. But this is just one edge of the sword. All technologies can also serve bad intentions. We can be quantitatively more informed, but qualitatively less so. We may be connected to more people, but maybe less well connected. With the pandemic having generated global fear and insecurity, the misuse of virtual technologies contributed, in some cases, to compromising trust amongst people, organisations, and governments. What we call “common sense” or consensus may now seem harder to achieve. Now more than ever we see the need for well-informed and open dialogue, and processes for facilitation. If used correctly, social and information technologies can afford great opportunities.
Dialogue and consensus through facilitation
Within the EU REDD Facility team, I’m focusing on our Latin America partner countries, Colombia and Ecuador, along with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). When looking at the complex nature and diverse drivers of deforestation in these countries, there is general agreement that there are no “silver bullet” solutions for national REDD+ objectives. Rather, what’s needed is mechanisms that provide flexibility and the capacity to adapt to different sectors, local contexts and actors.
Through my work in Colombia, I’ve supported the development of local intercultural land-use governance mechanisms in the Amazonian area of Caquetá, where significant deforestation occurs. This project took place over several local administrative areas known as “veredas” of the Solano municipality, just at the deforestation frontier. The main challenge has been dialogue between indigenous Inga people and local cattle ranchers, to develop consensus on land-use management and reducing deforestation while ensuring a decent living income for farmers. What struck me from the beginning is that the real bottleneck preventing dialogue – and thus consensus on action and co-management of the territory – wasn’t discrepancies in visions and culture between communities. Rather, it was ignorance and lack of knowledge and understanding of each other. Once the first steps of the facilitation process allowed both communities to come to know and better understand each other’s perspectives and governance mechanisms, a dialogue became possible.
The lesson here has been that negotiations, dialogue, and consensus can be achieved if a facilitating third party can ensure this first layer of knowledge and understanding. It does not mean that the way towards a final agreement will be easy, but certainly easier and possible.
Thus, for our 2021 support to these three countries, we decided to increase the facilitation component of our work to generate technical dialogue – first to share information and generate common knowledge, and then to identify potential solutions or mechanisms to improve governance and sustainability of land use. Of course, our plan is to do this virtually, given the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
In both Colombia and Ecuador, the cocoa sector involves several actors with varied interests. Colombia’s cocoa market is characterised by strong internal demand for chocolate (80% of cocoa produced is consumed locally) while Ecuador has a significant cocoa export market (85% of national production is exported). Both countries registered great production increases in the last years: between 2000 and 2017, Colombia’s total cocoa production has doubled while Ecuador registered almost a six-fold increase in cocoa. Ecuador is now the third-largest cocoa producer country worldwide, with 7% of global production. While cocoa is not considered a driver of deforestation in these countries, the expansion of land for cocoa cultivation has been increasing since 2007 and poses a potential risk for deforestation in the future, along with associated social and environmental risks.
In this context, traceability and transparency systems are crucial for identifying, monitoring and tackling environmental and social issues in supply chains.
Traceability refers to methods of tracing a commodity through the supply chain, while transparency is the disclosure of sourcing information to increase the accountability of relevant stakeholders. However, the exact definition of these concepts is not always the same amongst supply-chain actors, and the use of such systems is not always associated with the same objectives. It has led to the current situation where actors with enough financial capacity have developed their own private traceability systems, sharing only a small part of their database publically, and withholding data from existing national monitoring systems.
COVID-19 and its related restrictions has reduced access to information and deeply modified our economies, putting many sectors in a fragile position. Ignorance and poverty are the enemy of good governance, and persistent asymmetry of information will never allow for social and environmental sustainability and justice. There is need for a common understanding and definition of concepts of traceability and transparency and what they serve. Adequate systems also need to be designed through participatory processes. If not, traceability will only empower the upstream side of supply chains where the bulk of information and data will circulate, not always for or with full transparency. For unscrupulous business operators, maintaining the ignorance of clients, competitors and even partners can be used for competitive advantage. Reducing the asymmetry of information by promoting more transparent traceability systems would lead to improved governance of supply chains.
The EU REDD Facility facilitated technical and multi-stakeholder dialogues in Ecuador and Colombia, virtually, to evaluate the feasibility and options for national traceability and transparency systems (in line with the Transparency Pathway tool developed by the EU REDD Facility). We are now finalising proposals to be used as the basis for further political dialogue and decisions.
In DRC’s climate change and deforestation policy process, national civil society organisations (CSOs) are officially represented under the umbrella of the national Groupe de Travail-Rénové REDD network, or GTCR-R. Created in 2013, the network has proven its capacity to improve coordination amongst its members and to some extent to influence DRC decision and policy-making processes.
However, as in many countries in the region, civil society is sometimes involved only after the design phase of a project, a programme or a policy document, during the “consultation” phase for their validation. To change this paradigm, with GTCR-R and its members, the EU REDD Facility chose to organise an “ex-ante consultation”, or what we decided to call a “concertation”. In this new process, two aims were achieved:
As in Latin America, COVID-19 increased isolation of remote actors in many African countries and it has been quite challenging to support such dialogue from a distance, with technology as our only option. However, this experience showed a better capacity to adapt than expected, and this should be reinforced in the future.
The final civil society position paper will be considered as a relevant basis for the Sustainable Management Programme soon to be launched. This programme has the objective (amongst others) of elaborating a national Forest Policy.
This concertation process amongst CSOs did not bring full consensus on the orientations and recommendations for the future policy, but it did help to nuance and somewhat soften initial and purely ideological positions, and even sometimes build bridges between positions. More importantly, by sharing the same level of information in a transparent way, conflicts over facts were eventually set aside to concentrate on needed solutions. In my view, that is already half the problem solved.
Of course, the reality of decision-making processes is complex, and does not succeed only through facilitating multi-stakeholder dialogue with technical information. Even more when this facilitation is done virtually. However, having those two elements will always catalyse and prepare a solid and recognised basis, as well as generate information that is valuable and additional to what an ad hoc expert analysis could provide.
This pandemic made facilitation activities complicated, but at the same time more needed than before. We should take available technologies and virtual options as opportunities to do our best. I’m convinced that facilitation is more crucial now than ever. We cannot let global health crises like this pandemic separate us more than we already were.
