Dibya Gurung, WOCAN Core Associate, attended the Oslo REDD Exchange on 14-15 June. Watch Dibya’s intervention during the session on ‘Lessons from place-based initiatives: Finance, tenure, gender, and linkages to national programs’. She asked the panelist if the research on benefit sharing and participation have any linkages with national programs. She expressed her disappointment that gender issues were not brought up during other plenary sessions despite the fact that women are the primary stakeholders in agriculture and forestry in much of the developing world. This lack of recognition not only derails the efforts made to integrate gender globally and nationally, but also affects the types and scale of investments made for gender within REDD+ initiatives.
The needs to change ways on how forests (tropical) are managed and protected were highlighted by several sessions and panelists. They emphasized that international collaborations, alliance building and partnership is key to aneffective delivery of REDD+ at national and sub-national levels. The 6-Ps approach that links – Production, Protection, Private, Public, People Partnership should be explored, understood and promoted. There was significantrecognition given to the local community and indigenous people’s roles in the REDD+ processes at the conference. However, the discussions in the parallel sessions between the IPs and their respective country’s policy-makers/ministers showed that the issues faced by IPs in REDD+ are not fully understood and categorized as a localized issue.