Presented by Peter Gubbels, Director Action Learning and Advocacy (Groundswell International) & Senior Fellow Global Evergreening Alliance. During Groundswell International: Restoring Sahelian Drylands: Practice, evidence, lessons and scaling session of GLF Africa
Nightside clouds and disequilibrium chemistry on the hot Jupiter WASP-43b
Restoring African Drylands Scaling: What insights from practice?
1. Restoring African Drylands
Scaling: what insights from practice?
How can civil society organizations
be mobilized to scale out regreening?
Lessons and principles from
Groundswell experience in West
Africa drylands
Peter Gubbels
Director Action Learning and Advocacy &
Senior Fellow
Global Evergreening Alliance
2. What does Scaling of Evergreening involve?
Scaling of evergreening has three dimensions:
horizontal (outscaling);
vertical (upscaling) to address obstacles and to
create a favorable enabling policy environment, and
deepening (or intensification) of the evergreening
practices to regenerate a farming and landscape
system.
Horizontal scaling
• is a technical and social process that leads ever-
greater numbers of rural households and
communities to adapt and applying evergreening
practices,
• in sequential and progressive manner, in their
specific landscape context,
• reaching a critical mass of social mobilization
• whereby the process becomes largely self
spreading.
3. Vertical scaling involves an institutional uptake of
evergreening (e.g., by local government, supportive
value chains in the markets, in national environmental
and tree ownership policies, and research programs, and
by relevant agricultural and environmental actors).
Deepening scaling involves
• intensification of evergreening practices at the
landscape level to successfully stop degradation
and begin to restore the agro-ecological system in a
given territory.
• optimizing the synergies by a sequential and
progressive uptake of often complementary
evergreening practices i.e., developing the value
chain of non timber forest products
• providing benefits for women or youth, or
• complementary soil and water conservation
practices.
Effective scaling of evergreening requires building
bridges between these 3 dimensions; linking technical,
political/institutional and social factors
Glyricidia seedlings, Mali
4. The urgent need to scale Evergreening for Ecosystem Restoration
Evidence is mounting of the role of
evergreening in addressing land,
ecosystem, food and climate crises
Efforts to scale up evergreening/land
restoration have not yet reached the
urgently needed breadth and depth
across different levels to achieve Bonn
Challenge
Much is still to be learned about how
to quickly and effectively take
evergreening to scale for:
1. Food and nutrition security
2. Adaptation and mitigation of
climate change
3. Sustainable land management
5. Issues in scaling evergreening
Transition: Evergreening involves a progressive
intensification of practices and building on
synergies to transform a social /agricultural-
livestock /landscape system
To transform the farming system and landscaope
must also address the connected social-cultural
relations and institutions in a particular territory.
Because it highly knowledge intensive, and is
shaped by local opportunities, and ecosystems,
regreening is highly context-specific
What works in one territory/landscape may not be
very useful elsewhere
Most farmers/herders do not adopt many
different regreening practices at once.
ISSUE: Scaling regreening is often focused on
technical spreading one or two highly productive
practices only…
6. Aside from regreening practices, what else
needs to be scaled?
Social, cultural and institutional issues as:
women’s empowerment (decision-making, access
to land, tools, seeds, credit)
Equity: needs of marginalized groups and
households
diversity of diets, local value chains and markets
the quality of local governance (community,
municipal)
community leadership and organizational
capacity (mobilizing resources, taking collective
action, adapting and spreading innovations)
Scaling evergreening requires a progressive, but also integrated approach addressing both the technical, social
and institutional/policy dimensions
7. STRATEGY 1: FOLLOW A PROGRESSIVE PROCESS
Participatory diagnosis/landscape mapping
Identify existing solutions/regreening practices
Promote only 2 or 3 evergreening practices from a “menu”
Choose practices that will provide quick and tangible results to
real problems perceived by communities
Foster farmers/herders learning from peers via field visits
Organize practical “hands-on” training in selected communities
Decentralize the sessions, so that the locations can be reached by
everyone, particularly women
Early success will often motivate farmers to a step further;
towards a transition using a more complex set of agroecological
practices.
Promote a “second” and then third wave of innovations
Seek out the sequence and combination of changes for synergies
Start to integrate related issues of equity, women, nutrition, governance
8. STRATEGY 2: ENSURE EQUITY IN THE SCALING PROCESS
Ensure the active participation and engagement of the most
vulnerable families, and women
Address complex, culturally sensitive issues related to equity
and gender/women’s empowerment and youth
Engage the broader community in a dialogue and develop
intentional strategies for equity
Build on local social-cultural values of solidarity and mutual
support. Such discussion helps to diffuse jealousy and
misunderstanding.
Develop specialized and tailored specialized support for
women because of their role the family economy
Foster active self-organized women’s groups (e.g., on issues
related to access to land, seeds, water, knowledge, or credit)
is a vital factor of success for the scaling process
Develop income generating activities from regreening
ensuring youth and women benefit.
Equity requires giving attention to ethnic and clan
differences and youth within communities, and the
relationships between farmers and pastoralists
9. STRATEGY 3: TRANSFORM GOVERNANCE AND ENABLE
COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT TO LEAD
The agency of village-based organizations and
community leaders must be at the heart of scaling
Enhancing local leadership and capacity is vital for
progressive spreading
Primary role of local government is to facilitate
conditions that allow communities to decide
priorities, select solutions, take collective action
Role of outside actors (such as NGOs, technical
assistance agencies, research) is to support this
process of communities managing their actions.
Quality of the engagement of officials and
technicians with communities increases when they
have opportunities to visit fields and talk directly
with community members (caravans)
Scaling is more rapid when all actors share a similar
vision and understanding of evergreening
Strengthening Local Governance for
Resilience: Partial view of CARAVAN to influence
Regional, Provincial and municipal decision makers
(Burkina Faso). Caravans can help change perceptions of
government agencies of their roles, and the way they should work
with rural people.
10. Taking evergreening innovations to scale is not feasible unless
communities mobilize themselves and fully engage
Farmer to farmer/community to community: learning and spread of regreening practices
strengthen capacities of communities to lead and manage programs
11. Eight phases in a process to scale Evergreening
PHASE 1: Define the causes and solutions for land degradation
Use a participatory diagnosis process to define, together with
communities, the primary causes of chronic vulnerability.
Use findings to help communities identify, select their preferred
new practices that offer solutions
PHASE 2: Identify ‘easy’ practices that quickly generate results
Let communities prioritize a limited number of relatively
easy, low-cost, and relevant regreeninogy innovations.
PHASE 3: Organize villages within a landscape zone
identify all major villages/communities
group into clusters (based on market or other linkages)
identify a dynamic « sentinel village » within each cluster
focus initial support in this sentinel village
regularly invite delegates from other communities in the
cluster to observe, learn and engage
Sentinel
community
Target
Community
Admin/Landscape
area
Cluster of
communities
Leverage experience and leaders in sentinel villages to spread
regreening to other interested communities within the cluster
12. Phases for scaling out regreening
PHASE 4: Learning visits.
Within each cluster, the sentinel communities serve as a
learning center for the other communities in the cluster.
Bring influential leaders from neighboring communities to the
sentinel village to see practical, successful evergreening
practices
PHASE 5: Farmer/Pastoralist volunteers training their peers
Build a group of ‘volunteer trainers.’ in each village, both men
and women
Ensure that each major neighborhood in the communities
reached have at least 2 respected and credible trainers
Encourage each of these volunteers to train four or five
neighbors.
Generate a rapid local multiplier effect across the entire
community
13. Phases for scaling (continued)
PHASE 6: Integrate more complicated
practices and social issues.
After the first wave of initial innovations start
spreading interest and motivation, initiate the
second wave
Start dialogue to undertake additional activities to
address equity, women’s empowerment and
nutrition
PHASE 7: Strengthen governance.
Strengthen governance capacities of local
community leaders /local government
Foster the emergence of community based
structures with responsibility to oversee, lead,
manage, and sustain this process for scaling
independently
Work with local government councils and elected
officials to raise awareness, integrate agroecology
into local development plans and budgets
14. Phases in scaling out (continued)
PHASE 8: Reach out, communicate and advocate.
Use the media, especially (rural) radio Increase the
network of farmer/pastoralist trainers
Organize competitions and cultural activities within
the area.
Seek out and connect to networks of social actors
engaged in supporting agroecology:
farmer/pastoralist organizations and rural women’s
associations
Create sufficient momentum to persuade enough
actors (i.e., local governments) to shift their ways
of working to support regreening.
Use caravans to take political actors and journalists
on learning visits to successful sites.
Demonstrate the success of regreening to local
governments and beyond
15. Phase 8 Advocacy (continued)
Build support by small scale
farmers/pastoralists through education and
awareness raising on causes and solutions of
land degradation
Educate the media: take them to visit
communities and interview farmers
Conduct mass farmer/pastoralist -led
campaigns in the streets of urban centers and to
parliament
Media engagement: debates by social
movement leaders and activists and policy
makers on national television and radio.
Produce and broadcast video documentaries
on regreening
Organize caravans for policy makers and
farmers
16. Phase 8 Advocacy/Outreach, continued
Map all evergreening hotspots and
experiences across the country
Networking: convene and organize regional
and national workshops and conferences with
interested civil society organizations to
coordinate, and learn from each other
Policy Analysis: Determine what policies and
programs work against evergreening, and
what supports evergreening (tree ownership,
environmental regulations etc.)
Movement building: Convene actors to
collectively determine policy
recommendations. Plan national campaigns to
influence government
Hinweis der Redaktion
What is Scaling?
There is no predefined formula for scaling agroecology in an integrated manner.
promotion of new practices, combining short term gains with longer-term wins for optimal effect.
The actual combination and sequence of technical and social innovations depend on the availability of local resources, on what the community needs and prioritizes, and on other contextual factors
.
Promoting greater equity entails deliberately including the youth
Farmer to farmer/community to community: Use of Model or champion farmers, Farmer field schools, clustering of villages, cascading training, rural radio, prizes and competitions
Leverage experience and leaders in pilot village to spread AE to other interested villages within the cluster