Final Conference "Ecoregional Research and Policy making, living happily ever after?"
The Final Conference of the Ecoregional Fund was held in the Windsor Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya on September 21 - 22, 2005.
This Conference was by invitation only and brought together a small
group of around 30 international experts on policy making and
development research, the latter from both CGIAR and NARS.
As a basis for discussions, results were presented from the Ecoregional
Methodology Fund (the "Fund"), which is a development project financed
by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its objective was to:
Support
the development of new methoological tools for research that is
ecoregional in scope with the attention on promoting new approaches to
natural resource management and rural development in ecoregions
Ten projects were executed in the period 1996-2002. (For further details: see "Funded Projects" on this website where final reports are presented.)
The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved an extension phase
of the Fund in 2003, consisting of three so-called consolidation
projects, which was intended to expand, test and fine-tune results
obtained so far. Three final workshops of these consolidation projects
in 2005 (workshops in Panama in May and two in Nairobi in June)
presented results in terms of:
| (1) | Consolidation of frameworks and methods; |
| (2) | Testing and application of ecoregional methods in regional case studies in Panama, Tibet, Kenya and Uganda; |
| (3) | Development of user-friendly software; |
| (4) | Strategies for institutionalizing ecoregional analysis, and |
| (5) | The communication of results. |
The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested the Coordination
Committee of the Fund to organize a comprehensive final conference in
which results from the consolidation projects would be discussed with
external experts with the objective to develop common recommendations
for future ecoregional research. This final Conference was held in
Nairobi, September 21-22.
As input into the open discussions, the Fund requested the
participants to contribute to recommendations for future research by
emphasizing at least three aspects:
| (1) | The manner in which interactive research is being conducted; |
| (2) | The way in which policy makers and various stakeholders can be engaged into a joint learning process, and |
| (3) | Innovative ways in which effective communication among all involved can be achieved. |
