Connecting ideas, creating solutions: Stakeholder engagement

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Taking an adaptive and collaborative management approach to execution, the project will ensure that key stakeholders are involved early and throughout project execution as partners for development. This includes their participation in the EU-FCCB Programme Steering Committee, review of project outputs such as recommendations for amendments to policies, plans, programmes and legislation, as well as participation in monitoring activities.

Given the revised project strategy, the key project stakeholders are government agencies and departments involved in FCCB and other land use (LU) sectors. In addition to these governmental stakeholders, there are non-governmental stakeholders from academia, research, the private sector, and civil society organisations. During the establishment and or strengthening of technical working groups, these non-state organisations will also be invited to project activities to share their comparative expertise and to undertake selected project activities. These will be determined during project implementation when setting up the working group teams. Where appropriate, project activities will be integrated with those of development partners to achieve cost-effectiveness and capitalise on synergies. Stakeholders will participate in various training activities, as well as learn-by-doing working groups to test their new and improved skills for mainstreaming FCCB.

This project will contribute to building capacities of a large number of stakeholder representatives in the country to make more effective decisions about FCCB, in particular, to take a more holistic approach and thus generate global environmental benefits. Stakeholders to be trained will come from various line ministries and agencies on best practices and innovative approaches to monitor the environment, forestry and climate change. Particular attention will be given to actively engaging women and young staff members in the project, largely as trainees, to ensure diversity as well as to contribute to building up the government’s absorptive capacity.

The approach to stakeholder involvement and participation encourages adherence to the following guiding principles:

• Maximizing synergies with ongoing initiatives in the country.
• Ensuring accessibility of information, including by both government and non-government, to inform decision-making processes.
• Encouraging adherence to values of transparency, trust, equity, and fairness.
• Promoting responsiveness to identified needs and the highest ethical standards and respects for offering priorities and values.
• Ensuring local ownership and the creation of relevant outputs that are beneficial to communities and organisations.
• Supporting collaborative approaches to project interventions.
• Including different types of stakeholder groups in participation processes and benefit distribution, including but not limited to engagement, capacity building, employment, skills transfer, sharing of knowledge and the increase of cultural awareness.
• Developing mechanisms to manage conflicts in the public interest.
• Being flexible to adapt to changing circumstances.
• Fostering well-coordinated and planned implementation.
• Generating and responding to feedback.
• Creating proactive partnerships that will enhance the sustainability of the project results after project funding ceases.
• Encouraging connections, cohesion and knowledge transfer between stakeholders and stakeholder groups to foster a sense of collective ownership and responsibility, pride in shared accomplishments and a set of common understanding and values to tackle issues and problems.