Disclaimer:
Please be aware that the content herein has not been peer reviewed. It consists of personal reflections, insights, and learnings of the contributor(s). It may not be exhaustive, nor does it aim to be authoritative knowledge.
Title
Please provide a name for your action learning plan.
Facilitating Community Participation
Challenge statement
Challenge type: If you are working on multiple challenges, please indicate if this is your "big bet" or "exploratory" challenge.
Please note: we ask you to only submit a maximum of 3 challenges - 1x Big Bet, 2x Exploratory. Each challenge must be submitted individually.
EXPLORATORY
Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)
Our challenge is to understand if community participation and ownership of initiatives focused on conserving and restoring the environment can help to mitigate the problems of dependency on third-party intervention for environmental issues.
Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?
Established in 1992, the year of the Rio Earth Summit, the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) embodies the very essence of sustainable development by "thinking globally acting locally". By providing financial and technical support to projects that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people's well-being and livelihoods, SGP demonstrates that community action can maintain the fine balance between human needs and environmental imperatives.
The programme provides grants of up to $50,000 directly to local communities including indigenous people, community-based organisations and other non-governmental groups for projects across the following thematic areas: Biodiversity, Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, Land Degradation and Sustainable Forest Management, International Waters and Chemicals and Capacity Development.
SGP Nigeria have conducted 178 projects across 29 states, spanning over 200 communities since 2009. In which over $6m of grants have been disbursed to respective projects.
SGP has identified programme related challenges affecting delivery, including sustainability issues; specifically pertaining to the activity of projects being dependent of SGP financing and the majority of which failing to outlast the term of SGP financing.
Consequently, meaning that SGP initiated projects have limited lasting impact on the local communities and environment in which they are positioned to affect.
Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.
Qualitative evidence: What weak signals have you recently spotted that characterizes its urgency? Please provide qualitative information that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge. You can add text, a link, or a picture.
Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?
The Accelerator Lab is deploying solutions mapping to services to uncover underutilized and overlooked solutions pertaining to community participation and ownership within environmental interventions.
The Accelerator Lab is utilising its diverse partner network amongst academia, INGOs, IOs, CSOs that have deployed, tested and validated relevant solutions within local communities across Nigeria.
The insights from this challenge is intended to position GEF-SGP Nigeria to be able to extend its impact whilst maintaining its input of financial resources into the national programme via spurring community participation and ownership of environmental interventions.
Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?
Understanding how community ownership of initiatives focused on conserving and restoring the environment can help to mitigate the problems of dependency on third-party intervention for environmental issues.
Partners
Who are your top 5 partners for this challenge? Please submit from MOST to LEAST important and state Name, Sector and a brief description of the (intended) collaboration.
Please state the name of the partner:
Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme
What sector does our partner belong to?
Government (&related)
Please provide a brief description of the collaboration.
The UNDP GEF-SGP and UNDP Accelerator Lab will collaborate to develop a solutions catalogue related to methodologies that spur community participation and ownership of local environmental interventions. Exploration and testing of the solutions as a resource in the implementation of future SGP projects will be conducted.
Is this a new and unusual partner for UNDP?
Yes
Learning questions
Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?
How might third-party actors support local communities facing environmental challenges without creating dependency complexes and behaviour
How can communities be sensitised to environmental issues whilst being given the autonomy and freedom to accept or reject action on such issues
What processes can be put in place to ensure the objectives of third-party environmental interventions are aligned with the actual desires and interests of communities?
What (new) social contracts need to be in place between communities, community leaders, civil society institutions for community ownership of environmental interventions to occur
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Sense, Explore, Test
Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
Behavioral Insights – To challenge the robustness of solutions when faced with diverse and changing human behavior
Collective Intelligence – Collation of insights from academia, CSOs and IOs pertaining to community participation of development interventions to recognise validated solutions and to identify knowledge gaps
Participatory Design – Engagement with NGOs, CSOs and local communities to consider practical steps necessary to implement mapped solutions
Sensemaking – Understanding the diversity and unique nature of social engagements and social contracts amongst communities, as they pertain to specific environmental issues.
Solutions Mapping – Identification of existing related solutions that can be adopted.
Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
The new data sources used provide information on the nature of social engagements within communities, solutions that have been tested and validated by academia, CSOs and development actors; and the malleability of solutions in differing socio-cultural contexts.
Closing
Early leads to grow: Think about the possible grow phase for this challenge - who might benefit from your work on this challenge or who might be the champions in your country that you should inform or collaborate with early on to help you grow this challenge?
The UNDP GEF-SGP network of partner CSOs and NGOs may find solutions mapped in this challenge useful as a means to sustain community action beyond external financing and their own interventions. To grow this challenge UNDP GEF-SGP Nigeria will be a key a partner.
END OF ACTION LEARNING PLAN: Thank you! The form saves automatically and your submission has been recorded. You may now exit this window.
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