Collaborative learning for ecosystem services governance in the context of poverty alleviation.
The ground-breaking SUS-programme brings together teams of stakeholders in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, South Africa, Sweden and Tanzania to support collaboration and learning for strong urban sustainability. It is offered by SWEDESD, in close cooperation with the Centre for Environment Education (CEE) based in India, the Southern African Development Community’s Regional Environmental Education Programme (SADC-REEP), the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), the Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy (ICLD), Global Action Plan International (GAP Int’l) and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).
More than half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities and over 90 percent of urbanization is taking place in the developing world. The SUS-program is structured around the view that meeting the challenges of rapid urbanization requires a significant shift towards more collaborative, adaptive and reflexive forms of urban planning and governance, underpinned by processes of collaborative learning. While dealing with urban sustainability in a holistic manner the SUS-programme is focused on ecosystem services approaches to poverty alleviation (ESPA) in urban settings.
ESPA seeks to tie together experiences of social and environmental programmes in order to tackle poverty alleviation in a more holistic manner, recognizing the interdependence between humans and nature. It involves accounting for and investing in ecosystem services to meet challenges such as securing and improving air quality, water quality, climate regulation and food provisioning. This requires collaboration and learning across borders of sectors, organizations and traditions
The program provides opportunities for participants to develop their understanding of ESPA, reflexive forms of governance, change processes and to acquire tools to support collaboration and social learning. The program, that started in April 2010, involves six selected cities in Southern Africa and South-East Asia and runs over nine months. Read more about the work in these six cities or see under the heading in the left side-bar.
Currently a second phase of the programme is under preparation which will bring new cities into the programme.
Please contact the project leader Alexander Hellquist for more information about the programme.
