Community participation

Beginning with a grassroots approach to water management, increased knowledge and information and the improvement of environmental health and livelihoods, the region around the Tacaná volcano on the border of Guatemala and Mexico has shown the way forward in scaling up local level approaches to national level initiatives.

In the Volta basin, WANI and partners have worked with riparian states to improve water governance and water management practices. This has resulted in multi-scale participatory governance frameworks for joint management of water resources and improvement of livelihoods through riverbank protection schemes. This has complemented and helped to facilitate large scale government and donor initiatives that have supported the establishment the Volta Basin Authority.

The aim of this manual is to strengthen the community of practitioners who are using an innovative range of visual techniques in dealing with conservation and development situations. Visualization techniques are used to compare visions of stakeholders and to negotiate trade-offs through comparing these visions. Different visualization techniques are already widely used and several of these are discussed in this manual.

A symposium on community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) for the conservation of CITES-listed species was organized by the Austrian Ministry of the Environment and the European Commission in Vienna, Austria, in May 2010. Its aim was to provide the necessary knowledge base for a broad policy discussion within the European Union on the relevance of local conservation programmes for CITES to achieve the goals as set out in its current Strategic Vision 2008-2013 (Res. Conf. 14.2).

One of the pre-requisites in the process of putting in place the Kikuletwa Catchment Forum is development of training materials to be used for Training of Trainers (TOT) programme covering topics in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), entrepreneurships; community participation; gender and other cross cutting issues relating to WRM, climate change and adaptation strategies and the contribution of water resources in poverty reduction.

Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary (PKWS) is one of the most significant coastal wildlife sanctuaries in Cambodia because it maintains a sizeable area of both mangrove forest and evergreen forest, as well as a number of globally threatened species.

Government of Pakistan set in motion the local governance system under the Local Government Ordinance (LGO) 2001, which introduced a three-tier system of governance at the district, tehsil and union council level.