13-November-2007 SEARCA News
Nine experts, two UNDP representatives, and three SEARCA officials convened for a roundtable discussion on lessons learned from the Small Grants Program to Promote Tropical Forests (SGP-PTF) last Nov. 10 at the Sam-Arng Room, SEARCA, Los Baños, Laguna.
One of the key lessons gleamed from the program is that in the absence of formalized legal framework in terms of access rights of the community, there is a need to improve communicative interaction between communities and local authorities so that access rights can be arranged informally.
Mr. Ed Queblatin, regional program coordinator discussed the four major themes of accumulated lessons from SGP-PTF. These are: 1) coping with resource uncertainty and living with rapid social change, 2) strengthening local forest governance, 3) supporting practice through policy and collaboration, and 4) sustaining livelihood. He firmly said that sustainable forest management should always involve the community, local government and other sectors of the locality in order to be effective.
In his opening remarks, Dr. Gil C. Saguiguit, Deputy Director for Administration of SEARCA said, “This [roundtable] is our continuing effort to share the learnings of the program… this is an innovative way of articulating our advocacy on natural resource management which is one of the thrusts of SEARCA. We also put a lot on knowledge management (KM) as our voice in bringing out the worthwhile outputs of our work.”
SGP-PTF has been implemented for five years and as the project nears its end, the collaborators are looking into possible continuing steps. The roundtable mainly aimed to review key lessons learned from the project and identify KM strategies that can maximize dissemination and utilization of these lessons.
The roundtable participants represented various organizations such as the Asia Forest Network, ASEAN Social Forestry Network, ASEAN Center for Biodiversity (ACB), Regional Community Forestry Training Center (Asia and the Pacific) (RECOFTC), Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ANGOC), and the School of Environmental Science and Management (SESAM), University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB).
Funded by the European Commission (EC), SGP-PTF is a partnership project of SEARCA and UNDP. The program provided support to enhance the capacity of the communities in eight Asian countries (Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia) to address the twin goals of managing the tropical forests and reducing poverty in these communities. (Ranell Martin M. Dedicatoria, KMU)
