Towards a Stakeholder Engagement Platform: Insights from our “Networks of Networks” Meeting
In today’s world, despite the vast amount of time we spend communicating—whether in meetings, emails, or social media— it often feels like we struggle to engage with different perspectives on a topic. We are also facing this challenge in forest management, where diverse stakeholders, each with unique backgrounds and priorities, must come together to find common ground to support biodiverse and resilient forests for the future.
At our recent “Network of Networks” meeting on 18 September 2024 in Bonn, we sought to bridge this gap through a World Café approach. This way, we created space for authentic dialogue on how we can integrate different forest ecosystem services like biodiversity, water provision and carbon storage into forest management. This format allowed stakeholders to engage in meaningful conversations, understand each other’s perspectives more deeply, and identify new avenues for collaboration. Together, we explored the barriers and enablers to working collectively across different sectors. Finally, we explored how we can continue this networking and keep the momentum.
Across five tables with different discussion topics (Policy, Nature Conservation, Media & Society, Science, Forest Owners), we synthesized key insights on stakeholders’ challenges, interests, and frameworks:
We clearly know that dialogues are only effective when they are closely linked to actions. Therefore, from here, we are moving forward to:
🌳 plan follow-up activities: connecting science, policy, and practice networks in further activities;
🌲 team up with partner projects and networks for common activities (back-to-back meetings, participation and representation in events) and identify synergies in approaches, test sites & living labs, and communication;
💬 strengthen a communication lane for networks on relevant information and involve networks for the design of the knowledge hub.
All of the valuable input will feed into the construction of TRANSFORMIT’s Stakeholder Engagement Hub – more updates and information will follow soon.
Visual Harvesting of the meeting was done by Visuality.