FLARE 2022 – Rome

Workshop 1 - Building a FLARE forest landscape restoration community
Organizer: Johan Oldekop, University of Manchester

Halting and reversing forest loss is essential for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. Indeed, 2021 marks the start of the UN Decade on ecosystem restoration and international agendas have pledged to restore 350 million hectares of forests globally. Over the past two decades, scholars have focused on identifying which forest ecosystems and regions need to be protected and how they should be restored. However, the social dimensions of forest restorations are poorly understood and conceptual frameworks linking forest governance, livelihoods and restoration remain under-developed.

This workshop will build on this year’s “(Forest) Landscape Restoration: People, Trees, Politics” theme and will bring together elements of the FLARE community working on forest landscape restoration to synthesize knowledge from this year’s presentations with the view to: (i) build an interdisciplinary working group of scholars and practitioners researching empirical, conceptual, and practical solutions to forest landscape restoration problems; (ii) develop a special issue based on forest landscape restoration-related papers presented at FLARE 22; and (iii) explore potential synergies for future collaborative research projects and proposals on key forest landscape restoration issues, including the political economy and political ecology of forest landscape restoration and the evaluation of forest landscape restoration initiatives and interventions.

Workshop 2 - Learning tools for more inclusive participatory processes

Organizers: Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, Anne M. Larson, Iliana Monterroso and Kristen Evans - CIFOR-ICRAF

Virtually all major efforts to address global problems regarding land and resource use call for some kind of multi-stakeholder forum, platform or process (MSFs). MSFs have been linked to more sustainable and resilient outcomes, more effective multi-level and multi-sector governance, more equitable and beneficial outcomes for local populations, and more productive research engagement. However, uncritical optimism towards the planning and implementation of the multi-stakeholder paradigm, supported by the lack of evidence-based lessons, is unhelpful. In fact, in CIFOR-ICRAF's global comparative research (https://www.cifor-icraf.org/gcs/research-themes/multilevel-governance/multi-stakeholder-forums/) we found that forum organizers often think that simply inviting people to the table assures equity and voice when it only glosses over differences and thus does not foster the transformative changes promised by collaboration. Responding to these findings and to requests by research participants for tools that support equity in MSFs, we developed a series of complementary monitoring and learning tools (https://www.cifor.org/toolboxes/tools-for-managing-landscapes-inclusively/).  

This workshop will engage with challenges of equity and social inclusion in the processes and outcomes of MSFs through two components. The first will start with a brief presentation of the workshop’s aims and a synthesis of the key findings of CIFOR’s comparative study on equity and social inclusion in MSFs, which will set the frame for an open discussion between participants on their different experiences/lessons to support equity and inclusiveness in forums. The second component will showcase the implementation methods and development of two complementary learning tools to support equity and inclusiveness in MSFs developed by CIFOR-ICRAF in collaboration with local partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The first, 'How are we doing?', was developed with MSF participants to be implemented by themselves as a reflexive and adaptive learning tool. The second, 'Getting it right', is a tool based on research with different MSF proponents and participants to support forum organizers in setting up inclusive spaces. Participants will learn how to use both tools and how to adapt them to different contexts. 

As a conclusion, we will invite participants to set up a research and practice network engaging with multi-stakeholder forums, platforms, and initiatives for future collaboration and research dissemination.

Workshop 3 - Beyond Land Rights: Linking livelihood and tenure security to advance community self-determination

Organizers: Kendi Borona & David Kroeker-Maus, Rights and Resources Initiative 

There is now widespread recognition within the scientific community of the higher incidence of biodiversity and lower rates of deforestation in territories where Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Descendant Peoples and Local Communities, and have secure land tenure rights. Concomitantly, the last year has witnessed renewed commitments from donors to strengthen community land and forest tenure as part of so-called Nature Based Solutions; however, it is also now well recognized that formalized land rights are not a panacea to the complex injustices of poverty and exploitative models of development. The struggle for land rights is inter-generational and at times indeterminate, while livelihood needs are a matter of basic everyday survival. Hence, there is a need to further nuance the link between secure community land rights and improved livelihoods capacities, as well as to promote collective action that links emerging research to policy advocacy and implementation at national and international levels.

It is against this backdrop that the RRI Coalition has been examining strategies for engagement with forest-dependent communities that extend beyond gaining legal recognition of land and resource tenure rights, and to advance livelihood security as an element of tenure security.  This workshop will present the status of a bottom-up research agenda being developed through an ongoing dialogue with our Coalition of 150+ highly diverse organizations across the Global South and will outline streams of engagement and analytical approaches related to collective rights, tenure security and livelihoods. Through this workshop we will present the methodological approaches and considerations used to develop this new research agenda and key findings from our engagement with rightsholders. This will be followed by a facilitated dialogue with guiding questions and interactive group discussion to further explore interactions between research, advocacy and implementation, as well as to refine specific indicators. This workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to contribute to an emerging agenda, including research, to advance the livelihoods dimensions of tenure security.

Workshop 4 - Forests Sustaining Agriculture Working Group: Developing a new paradigm of integrating forests and trees and food production

Organizer: Terry Sunderland, University of British Columbia

Agriculture remains the greatest driver of forest loss globally. Yet, forests and agriculture are inextricably interlinked in myriad ways. Current discourses on agricultural intensification often overlook the contribution of natural ecosystems for food production and livelihoods. Although some preliminary work has been undertaken on enhancing on-farm provisioning of ecosystem services, the ecological and socio-economic value of forests and trees in terms of their contribution to proximate agricultural production and livelihoods in the wider landscape is poorly understood and rarely integrated into land use planning and sustainable agricultural management practices. Research is also required to assess the complementarity and resilience of different crops and trees to climatic fluctuations at a landscape scale and how to better manage these landscapes under different socio-ecological contexts. Therefore, it is vital to expand our understanding of the contribution of forests and trees in supporting agriculture and livelihoods in multifunctional landscapes. In doing so, we can further develop methods to manage landscapes in an integrated and inclusive way that consider biodiversity conservation, sustainable forest management, agricultural production, wellbeing and food and nutritional security. 

This workshop, bringing together members of the FLARE Working Group on the topic will review recently-generated evidence of the critical roles that forests and trees play in agricultural production, particularly in the tropics, and identify a way forward for combining forests and agriculture in an integrated food systems approach at the landscape scale. An anticipated output from this workshop will be a working paper outlining what a future research programme on this topic would represent and a detailed roadmap for policy engagement in on-going international processes such as CoP27, the Global Landscapes Forum, among others.