Multistakeholder Dialogue In Senegal

Multistakeholder dialogue in Senegal

With IUCN Biodev 2030

As part of the BIODEV2030 project and in collaboration with IUCN Senegal, LEAF led a consortium of national and international consultants to facilitate a multi-stakeholder dialogue to catalyse voluntary commitments from economic actors for biodiversity in the Niayes landscape in Thiès territory. The approach combined five sessions of strategy games led at the landscape level with three national and sub-national workshops involving Senegalese authorities and decision-makers.

TerriStories©, a participatory game developed by consortium partner CIRAD, was used to bring out collective commitments where each stakeholder proposed their own commitments as well as for the other stakeholders, to co-build an effective and sustainable strategy. The approach was bottom-up, participatory and inclusive and was very well received by the participants from the agriculture and fishery sectors.

The game sessions were structured in five phases to help players to:

Build their own vision of their landscape;
Make the biodiversity degradation visible;
Freely express the causes of the problems;
Collectively identify actions that the different actors can take to reduce negative impacts on biodiversity;
Build a collective strategy to enforce decisions.

The participants were empowered to achieve specific voluntary commitments and distribute the responsibilities for achieving them. Recent results of the evaluation study of the sessions show that the approach also created a lasting multi-actor dynamic between the participants.

On 30 November 2022, the 14 representatives from the Senegalese agricultural and fisheries sectors agreed on four ambitions to restore and conserve biodiversity: planting 800,000 trees every year in fields and mangroves, adopting agroecology, fishing sustainably, and turning waste into compost to be used by farmers. These ambitions come with eight voluntary commitments to transform practices in their sectors and five requests to the State to improve regulations.

The BIODEV2030 project is financed by the AFD, coordinated by Expertise France and implemented by IUCN and WWF.

Story copied from IUCN and adapted by: LEAF

Photo credits: CIRAD