Draft Framework for Sharing Approaches for Better Multi-stakeholder Participation Practices

Many countries are beginning to engage stakeholders in domestic REDD+ decision-making processes, often with support from bilateral, multilateral and non-governmental initiatives. As part of the 2010 work plan for the Interim REDD+ Partnership, the Partners identified the need to initiate a process to share lessons on stakeholder participation practices and prepare an enhanced communication platform. This activity was initiated as an initial step toward helping decision makers improve the effectiveness of such processes by learning from other partners’ experiences and beginning to identify best practices.

This paper was commissioned at the end of 2010 to help achieve these objectives and provide a starting point for further activities in 2011. It includes:

a) A preliminary set of common terms relating to stakeholder participation (Section 3);

b) A framework for categorizing and describing different types of stakeholder engagement processes necessary to facilitate sharing of relevant experiences (Section 4);

c) A discussion of the types of information that seem most relevant for practitioners to share (Section 5); and

d) Next steps for developing a comprehensive and sustained approach to sharing information and ex- periences between and among partners, and identifying good practices (Section 6).

In addition, the information gathered in this process could help inform the development of systems to track how the stakeholder participation safeguard, as included in the Cancun REDD+ decision, is being addressed and respected.