With cultures, biodiversity and enterprises that cross political boundaries, multi-stakeholder collaboration is critical to integrated and sustainable development in the Gambella of Ethiopia.
Historically, the Gambella landscape, like other parts of the continent, has been characterised by a low level of coordination between different actors and sectors. Development planning did not foster multi-stakeholder collaboration between the key stakeholders in Gambella and in neighbouring regions of South Sudan, despite sharing a rich natural resource base. The work of the Horn of Africa Regional Environment Centre and Network (HoA-REC&N) to address this challenge is generating an evolving learning process, and offers an exemplary case for other landscapes in the Horn.
This welcome sign, close to the airport, invites visitors to work together in the sustainable management of Gambella’s natural wonders. Photo provided by HoA-REC&N.
As for all multi-stakeholder processes, taking a gradual, flexible and learning oriented approach to the management of the Gambella region is an important condition for realising integrated conservation and development. It requires a well-informed design of governance structures with clear agreement on boundaries between different land uses. When such boundaries are insufficiently enforced, encroachment into key conservation areas becomes a major threat.
Learning from the land: Gambella as an EcoHub
The latest HoA-REC&N project is the Gambella EcoHub. This is an effort to posit the Gambella region as a learning and demonstration site for sustainable forms of agriculture. HoA-REC&N aims to develop the EcoHub into an institution with positive impacts for the landscape. To this end, the Gambella regional government provided a plot of land of about 450 hectares to HoA-REC&N, with the vision of becoming a place that brings together various non-timber forest product value chains, where value is added to these products in the same landscape they are harvested.
Given Gambella’s low population density, hot and humid environment and predominately wetland ecosystem, there is much potential to introduce small-scale, decentralised forms of sustainable agriculture, especially permaculture and agroforestry. To strengthen the vision of the EcoHub, HoA-REC&N partners with the Dutch humanitarian NGO ZOA to jointly provide permaculture design courses to both rural communities near the Hub, and to South Sudanese refugees in the Jawe Refugee Camp.
Permaculture refers to a set of agricultural and social principles based on simulating patterns observed in nature. Courses in permaculture design are being offered to South Sudanese refugees and local community members from Gambella. Photo provided by HoA-REC&N.
As part of HoA-REC&N’s programming, landscape facilitators from numerous environmental organisations in the region will gather at the EcoHub in the coming years to exchange insights on stakeholder engagement to strengthen their own landscape processes. Key principles for the Gambella EcoHub, as part of HoA-REC&N’s regional climate change programme and as deemed necessary by the MSP Guide for the facilitation of multi-stakeholder platforms, are the promotion of collective leadership among regional partners and fostering participatory learning. In this way, multi-stakeholder platforms in six countries in the Horn of Africa can identify viable strategies to better protect Gambella’s natural treasures and secure sustainable modes of development.
Read More
Protecting Gambella’s hidden treasures requires multi-stakeholder involvement, Part 1.
Horn of Africa Climate Change Programme, funded by the Dutch government
From the blog: Six individual competencies for working with multi-stakeholder partners
This post was written with contributions from HoA-REC&N’s ILDP, Gambella Branch Office and Climate Change Programme teams and CDI’s landscape governance team.
Toon De Bruyn is a consultant working with Wageningen UR, Center for Development Innovation and the Food and Agriculture Organization on capacity development for landscape approaches and on land rights.
Daniel Wiegant Crespo works as the Landscape Governance and Development Advisor for the Horn of Africa Regional Environment Centre & Network.
Dr. Minu Hemmati is an associate with CatalySD Sustainability | Communications, an independent advisor on sustainable development, participatory decision-making and multi-stakeholder processes (www.minuhemmati.net) and a former board member of EcoAgriculture Partners.
Herman Brouwer is a Senior Advisor in Multi-stakeholder Processes in Food Security with Wageningen UR, Center for Development Innovation.
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