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Building knowledge networks

As practitioners of FLR, we are learning all the time, through experience and from each other. The GPFLR Learning Network provides an all-important vehicle for that learning process. It aims to connect our partners and collaborators around the world, from Scotland to the Sudan and Moldova to Malaysia, in a community of practice, enabling them to spread best practice, build cooperation and exchange new ideas and solutions.

The network’s focus is on highlighting the diversity of those solutions and the transferable lessons from them, not on reducing them to a convenient but unworkable formula. Our aim is to raise awareness of real world FLR experiences and make available the tools and knowledge to support practitioners in the field.

 

Learning network

While a range of ad hoc information sharing, learning and communications activities have taken place under the umbrella of the GPFLR during the past few years, partners have expressed a desire to undertake more coordinated learning.  The discussions within the GPFLR have focused on the formation of a network that most closely aligns with the notion of a best practice or knowledge for action network.  These involve learning aimed at doing something, i.e. aimed at doing FLR more effectively.

A learning framework provides strategies and channels for gathering information, providing insight into each individual’s learning whilst working under the umbrella of the partnership, and providing opportunities for reflection at strategic times.  It can help identify key patterns and impacts.  From this process adaptive – both supportive and corrective – action can be identified and taken.

It will be important not to act as a closed ‘club’ concentrating only on strengthening the capacity and practice of the partners inside the network.  A flexible system of interaction is required to encourage new understanding and relationships.

 

Learning sites

As agreed by the partners, participants in the learning network should be committed to:

1.  Balancing trade offs between and improving ecological integrity and peoples’ livelihoods

2.  FLR principles:

a. Restoration of a balanced package of forest functions
b. Active engagement, collaboration and negotiation among a mix of stakeholders
c. Working across a landscape
d. Learning and adapting

3.  Sharing information, monitoring and learning through the learning network.

The intent is to bring together sites that partners and other collaborators have “volunteered” then provide a framework for engaging them in a suite of learning activities as appropriate to their situation and interests.  There should be a diversity and mix of site types in the network, in terms of:  sample size, ownership mix, geographic balance, and range of sites at different stages of progression in FLR (planning, implementation, and sites that display some characteristics of a restored ecosystem.)  On the other hand, some comparability is necessary to enable participants to learn from each other and this comparability will in the first instance flow from the commitments listed above.

We are currently assembling the first package of sites and will post additional information on this page when available.

Workshops

During 2009, workshops were organised in Indonesia (April), Rwanda (June), Brazil (October) and again in Indonesia (December). During these workshops, the concept of FLR was introduced and discussed, experiences were exchanged, and initial guidelines were developed on how to implement FLR in practice. These guidelines can be found here.

The aims of the workshops are to:

• Increase shared participant understanding of FLR principles and experiences
• Share information about the tools available to support FLR, including the ITTO Guidelines for the restoration, management and rehabilitation of degraded and secondary tropical forests and the GPFLR online learning platform
• Demonstrate and ‘test’ the FLR approach (including making recommendations to the sites visited)
• Identify sites to participate in the GPFLR Learning Network
• Identify learning needs and contribute advice to the GPFLR learning network

Documents, presentations and other materials from the workshops can be found here.

The various elements

• Learning Network
• Sites
• Workshops