AWARD is taking the opportunity to host a series of introductory webinars which will focus on implementation experiences of the RESILIM-Olifants Programme in the areas of water, biodiversity planning and conservation and climate change adaptation. The purpose is to give an engaging overview of the work done and to open a space for dialogue and learning. We aim to limit the ‘technical’ details and work broadly with design, innovation and practice. The systemic, social learning approach was a key innovation of the programme and where possible, we will talk about what this means in practical terms. Our Wednesday Webinars start at 11h00 am GMT +2. Each webinar is 1 hour, comprising a 20 – 30 minute overview of the topic followed by 15 – 30 minutes discussion. Please register to join us for all 5 webinars or any of these individually.
Biodiversity has either not been ‘on the map’ for municipal town planners or it has taken a back-seat when it comes to making land-use decisions. Given that well over half of all biodiversity is estimated to occur outside of national and provincial parks in Southern Africa, there is an important role for municipalities to play in biodiversity conservation, recognition for the role of ecosystem services and the role played by ecological infrastructure in risk reduction. In this webinar we introduce the Municipal Support Initiative under USAID:RESILIM Olifants and its efforts to embed biodiversity and conservation planning in municipalities through working with the Critical Biodiversity Area Maps (South Africa's standardized spatial biodiversity tool)... and spatial planners. What started out as a technical exercise soon became a journey of working with political leadership and the broader community of business and land owners. In this webinar we discuss the project objectives and actual outcomes after 4 years of activities, as well as provide some lessons and comments on the potential way forward in …getting biodiversity into municipal spatial planning.
Global concerns over declining freshwater resources are widely evident. The Olifants Basin – shared between South Africa and Mozambique – exhibits many of these concerns: declining water quality and flow, non-compliance with national and international benchmarks, weakening governance and capacity and unlawful use all juxtaposed against increasing livelihood insecurity, increasing demands and the need to provide water for growth and development. Climate change - projected to decrease flows by over 50% in the near future - will exacerbate these vulnerabilities as will the anticipated recession from COVID-19. How then do we chart a sustainable future? This webinar outlines recent experiences of supporting water resources governance for sustainability through an innovative, systemic social learning approach. Through the RESILIM-Olifants Proramme, AWARD has developed and tested this approach as an alternative to conventional, linear thinking to support good governance, IWRM and water resources protection. In 2015, flow cessation was almost inevitable given weakening governance and institutional capacity together with the worst drought on record – all of which threatened water resource integrity and human livelihoods. Despite this, flows were maintained and compliance with minimum statutory benchmarks was met at times. This webinar explores how a systemic collaborative approach, supported by integrated tools for decision-making, was used to maintain flow and establish partnerships to build resilience for an uncertain future.
In Southern Africa, local climates are heating up. A great deal of work is being done on developing ‘simple resources’ and ‘tool boxes’ for climate change capacity and action. However, climate concepts can be deeply alienating and overwhelming, both for local government officials who are tasked with developing climate preparedness and for the diverse stakeholder groups from vastly divergent socio-economic and educational backgrounds. These include civil society organisations, small-scale farmers, and natural resource managers. Finding an appropriately robust approach that was sufficiently flexible to meet these challenges was a priority for the RESILIM-Olifants Programme. This webinar showcases the systemic, social learning approach - known as the Dialogues for Climate Change Literacy and Adaptation (DICLAD) – which was developed to “demystify” climate change and make adaptation “everyone’s business”. It is designed to be used at a ‘local’ scale to map potential climate change impacts and develop adaptation plans. At the core is the integration of technical (localized, down-scaled data) and narrative information in a conversational process that expands peoples’ understanding of climate change from an ‘environmental’ issue to a ‘well-being’ issue and that maps potential adaptation pathways and plans at multiple scales. We reflect on potential uses and welcome discussion on when and where DICLAD may be used.
‘Small-scale farming’, ‘backyard gardening’, ‘village food production’… call it what you will, this kind of agriculture has received inadequate attention – and is even scorned - as a means of building regional food security. Despite some lip service, the lack of meaningful engagement is evidenced in the lack of support by government departments, financial institutions, markets and even consumers. However, with global climate change and pressures such as COVID-19, commercial production and food distribution networks are failing. Local food production, short supply chains and agro-ecological practices are emerging as an important contributor to food security, and at times even as an alternative to large-scale food producing monopolies. In this webinar we introduce the Agriculture Support Initiative under USAID:RESILIM Olifants and its efforts to support scale-scale farmer networks and agro-ecological skill development in order to build a more resilient and climate-smart means of food production throughout the Olifants Basin.
Globally, there is a trend towards decentralization of management rights to communities and the public, with community involvement in protected areas being seen as a way to reduce costs and conflict and increase the legitimacy of protected areas. Co-management is potentially an innovative model for addressing issues of socio-economic redress and upliftment, land reform and past injustices, and conservation. However, in many cases the ‘heyday’ of co-management seems to have passed and there is decreasing interest in how to support meaningful processes. In South Africa, protected areas are required to remain under conservation, so that land-reform beneficiaries - who have successfully won claim to their land (from which they were removed under apartheid and colonialism) - are reinstated land-ownership rights and afforded the opportunity to manage their land. Nonetheless, without adequate support to realise the multiple benefits, this is likely to undermine the potential conservation and livelihood outcomes and even contribute to greater antagonism towards protected areas. In this webinar we explore multiple issues that have arisen from our experiences of supporting emerging co-management and governance arrangement between the state and landowners of the Legalameetse Nature Reserve. Through a systems lens and ongoing social learning approach we outline key risks to the co-management framework as a way to marry conservation and reform. In addition to challenges of capacity and shifting power dynamics, lack of support and resources, is the concealed but significant role of political economy of high value protected areas and the dynamics that this driver introduces. We recognize that this is an issue facing many co-management initiatives and welcome discussions and experiences from others in supporting communities to address these.
COVID-19 is a vivid reminder that we need to be comfortable with complexity and uncertainty if we are to be productive in making a difference. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a sense-making tool that supports social learning, helping programme implementers take small steps and learn their way forward. A social learning approach is a commitment to develop a shared developmental agenda, goals and practices with others. It is not clear at the start where this might lead to, so it becomes important to trust but also carefully notice the process. Otherwise, the open-ended unknown may lead to paralysis, or over-planning. In this webinar we share our experiences of using complexity-sensitive M&E (developmental evaluation) in the RESILIM-O programme to support project staff working under the above conditions. We share what we have learned about harnessing M&E to track processes and early progress when eventual outcomes are still a long way off, to encourage reflection on failures as well as successes, to build understanding of and competence in M&E within the organisation, and to support learning. We explore the concept of ‘evaluation readiness’ and using different M&E approaches at different stages in the life of a programme, as well as the skills and dispositions needed for developmental M&E. Our experience is that a collaborative and integrated approach to M&E, where M&E is “everyone’s business” and is thoroughly woven into the organisation, helps staff to feel more comfortable with the complexity and uncertainty inherent in facilitating social learning processes.