Growing Forest Partnerships

Every month we highlight a new, groundbreaking or bestselling IIED research outcome. This month we feature the innovative project: 

Creating and strengthening ways of working together to benefit forests and those that depend on them

Growing Forest Partnerships (GFP) is about building up and supporting networks at local, national and international levels. Through this process, GFP seeks to improve the connections between forests and other sectors. It aims to ensure that global discussions about forests include the real and current challenges that forest-dependent people and local forest managers are facing, bringing the voices of local communities and indigenous peoples forward to influence decision-making.

The project grew from an independent consultation to explore and develop an idea of a global forest partnership proposed by the World Bank back in 2007.

GFP as it is now known started work in February 2009, developing pilot processes in three countries: Ghana, Guatemala and Mozambique. Since then this innovative project has expanded to include Liberia and Nepal.

How GFP works:

• It tailors its support to each country.
• To establish nationally relevant concerns and areas for support, GFP organizes ‘people’s diagnostics’ and other locally driven priority setting processes to identify the issues that matter locally.
• It supports existing initiatives that are already working on the ground and fill in gaps in ongoing processes, working to build capacity and support communications.
• GFP fosters partnerships that deliver practical and policy work, through which better collaboration and new ideas emerge.
• It also supports people to capture lessons from these effective partnerships and processes so that they can share their experience with others in the same situation in other countries as well as with decision and policy makers at international level.

GFP has a dedicated website www.growingforestpartnerships.org where you can:

• find out more about the countries and people participating in the project
• download briefings and reports
• watch ‘Canopy of Friends’ - film interviews with individuals with an interest in how we manage the world’s forests.
• subscribe to regular newsletters in English, French and Spanish

GFP is an initiative funded by the World Bank, currently involving the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Bank as implementing partners.

International year of forests main page

Previous features:

Tenure in REDD: Start-point or afterthought?

Bundles of energy: the case for renewable biomass energy

Small and Medium Forestry Enterprise series

Policy that works for forests and people