Forest partnerships at the grassroots level

Growing Forest Partnerships has now been operational as an initiative for 18 months now, having started its first discussions with partners in-country in February and March 2009. The initiative as a whole was started in order to catalyse and reinforce effective partnerships that deliver real results for forests and people: its stated vision is that it is “an initiative that helps create and strengthen ways of working together for the benefit of forests and the people that depend on them”.

For many involved, the hope has been that collaborations that start on the ground, involving the people who are directly involved with forests on a day to day basis finding new and creative ways to work together, might offer real and practical solutions to the global challenges that forests and
forest people face – and offer an alternative to the large-scale, generally top-down and one size fits all approaches that many organisations have a tendency to fall back on.

The basic theory of change has thus been that reinforcing partnerships working on forest issues will deliver real positive change. What this document will be examining, therefore, is what makes for an effective partnership, what principles GFP is applying in the partnerships it chooses to work with or to catalyse and what approaches will deliver effective partnerships. In particular, it will examine
how to bring new actors in – how to ensure that the partnerships being fostered are inclusive and start to get at the roots of the challenges facing forests.