Insights into CGIAR’s Initiative’s on Agroecology ‘Engagement and Sustainability Planning’ Workshop held by the Kenya team
Lisa Elena Fuchs
Following the 13 HLPE principles, agroecology champions doing things differently. Acknowledging the importance of process, members of the global Agroecology Initiative (AE-I) team wrote a reflection document detailing six fundamental Principles of Engagement (currently under review).
The Principles of Engagement document primarily aims to guide the implementing teams to be reflexive and self-aware in how they interact with various stakeholders and partners and, by extension, how they implement the AE-I on the ground. The principles highlight the importance of getting ‘engagement’ right from the onset of an agroecological co-creation process. This entails applying the principles when setting up the Agroecological Living Landscapes (ALLs), the socio-spatial vehicles within which the AE-I supports agroecological innovation across the seven case study countries.
The Kenyan AE-I team just concluded a five-day workshop whose objectives were to practically learn how to ‘do engagement’ to co-create and sustain the Kenyan ALLs. The workshop revolved around an adapted version of the Sustainability Planning approach, which was developed and implemented in the context of transition planning of the EU-funded Regreening Africa Programme. It draws on three important bodies of work within CIFOR-ICRAF, namely the Stakeholder Approach to Risk Informed and Evidence Based Decision Making (SHARED), a process for integrated, cross-sectoral engagement of stakeholders, Asset-based community-driven development (ABCD), a bottom-up, community-based and agency-focused engagement process and the Options by Context (oxc) approach, that supports local innovation by farmers. Following an integrated six-step approach, Sustainability Planning fosters collective action driven by so-called communities of place and supported by responsive external actors.
In alignment with the Principles of Engagement, Sustainability Planning:
1) Fosters reflexivity among external partners, such as the AE-I, from the on-set of the actual engagement on the ground
2) Entails an explicit process that helps external actors to facilitate community ownership and drive while ‘leading from behind’ in a responsive manner
3) Allows making an integrated and coherent co-creation ‘offer’ to the ALLs’ communities of place
The workshop concluded with ‘Seeing is Believing’ field visits to several farmer training centres that were jointly identified with core AE-I Kenya partners from Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Association Kenya and the Intersectoral Forum on Agrobiodiversity and Agroecology (ISFAA). The visit helped to confirm that there is a mutual ‘match’ between the visions, interests and activities of the AE-I and the respective centres. Specifically, the AE-I team engaged conversations and witnessed the motivation, lived experience, and existing opportunities in view of establishing a joint vision and co-creating a sustainable approach to agroecological food system transformation. Two outstanding farmer training centres were identified that will become the anchorage points of the initial Kenyan ALLs: The Drylands Natural Resource Centre (DNRC) in Mbumbuni, Makueni County, and the Community Sustainable Agriculture and Healthy Environment Program (CSHEP) in Ndeiya, Kiambu County.
Resources:
Have a look at the AE-I website.
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Read the blog about the OneCGIAR Agroecology Initiative set-off meeting in August 2022.
Find the blog on the OneCGIAR Agroecology Initiative inception workshop in March 2022.