De kracht van het Nederlandse ontwikkelingsbeleid is verdwenen

"The Netherlands has lost the strength of its international cooperation". This is stated by Cora van Oosten (Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation) and Rob Wildschut (Hivos), in their contribution to the online discussion of Vice Versa. They state that the ideas forming the basis for the new Dutch international cooperation policy are outdated, and have little content. The State's Secretary's most recent letter to the parliament shows a simplistic vision on international cooperation, and should be replaced by a better one, recognizing the achievements made by the international cooperation sector over the past 50 years, showing deeper insight in processes of global development, and real commitment to international solidarity

Reflection of a collective learning journey : Strengthening KCCEM to build the capacity of Conservation professionals in the Albertine Rift Region NICHE/RWA/025

Together with our support team from the Netherlands (Wageningen University), South Africa (South African Wildlife College) and Cameroon (Ecole de Faune) we embarked upon this journey of supporting the Kitabi College of Conservation and Environmental Management in Rwanda (KCCEM). The major building blocks of this learning journey are the development of a business model, the development of organisational capacity to implement the model, and the development of a range of products and services to be delivered with quality. All these three components operationalised within the policy frameworks and institutional context of Rwanda’s conservation, tourism and environmental management sector

Restoring Landscapes—Governing, Place: A Learning Approach to Forest Landscape Restoration

Forest landscape restoration is gaining ground, not least because of the role of forests in mitigating climate change. At present, pilot projects are initiated to generate “good practice” and “lessons learned” that can be scaled up to higher levels of policy making. However, landscape restoration is not new. People have always been constructing and restoring their landscapes to safeguard their livelihoods. A better understanding of existing local practice will help in identifying and implementing new restoration initiatives, and assure sustainable outcomes. Understanding local restoration practice means: (a) understanding how the biophysical conditions of landscapes are reshaped over time through the collective decisions of a landscape's inhabitants; and (b) understanding the governance mechanisms underlying these collective decisions. Thinking of governance from a landscape perspective adds a spatial dimension to governance as a means of reconnecting governance to landscape, citizenship to place. This offers the opportunity to cross administrative and political boundaries, allowing for broader groups of actors to engage in spatial decision making. Constructing networks across scales thus becomes an instrument for enhancing learning processes within and between landscapes and a means to scale up good forest landscape restoration practice for wider application at a global scale

Forest Landscape Restoration: Who Decides? A Governance Approach to Forest Landscape Restoration

Forest landscape restoration is currently gaining momentum as a means of jointly addressing climate change and future agricultural demands. Forest landscape restoration does not aim to ‘just’ restore forests, but to restore them from a broader perspective on the landscape as a whole, allowing simultaneous restoration of the ecological and productive functions of forests. There are many ways in which forested landscapes can be restored, depending on the biophysical characteristics of the landscapes, but also, and even more so on the interests of a landscape’s stakeholders, and the way in which they negotiate, and make landscape decisions. This complex process of decision making between stakeholders operating at various levels and scales is usually referred to as landscape governance. Landscape governance often does not tally with the political-administrative structures of states, because landscapes are usually not incorporated as a formal layer in the political and administrative structures of states. Instead, landscape governance is captured in a messy web of multi-actor networks, institutions and institutional arrangements, (in)formally constructed across levels and scales, more or less embedded in locally existing livelihood strategies and socially embedded institutional frames. Global initiatives on forest landscape restoration are therefore not to be institutionalized along structures of formal (de)centralized structures of states, but ‘bricoled’ though informal networks, multi-stakeholder coalitions, or public-private partnerships engaged in processes of landscape learning, where stakeholders learn to create and share institutional space. In this way, forest landscape restoration can become a catalyst for institutional change, transforming governance into a process of place-bound negotiation and decision making, to collectively make place