By Andrea Alatorre, PhD student at the Université du Québec en Outaouais and the University of Antwerp

I recently had the opportunity to present some of the research I have conducted during my PhD at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Forests & Livelihoods: Assessment, Research, and Engagement (FLARE) Network, in Rome, Italy. This was made possible by an Excellence Award from the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science (QCBS/CSBQ), and support from my advisor, Jérôme Dupras, through the Chaire de recherche du Canada en économie écologique.

What makes this conference special is that the FLARE Network truly sits at the interface between science and policy, and its annual meetings bring together researchers, practitioners and activists under the same roof for an event that is centered on generating (respectful) discussion, new collaborations, and cross-pollination of ideas. As someone who is trying to conduct research in a way that is participatory and cuts across multiple scales and disciplines, I found that my contribution was a good fit for the themes of the conference, and I received a lot of interest and positive feedback after my presentation titled Livelihoods in flux: How forest management for conservation and timber has transformed communities in Mexico.

This year’s theme was “Imagination and Innovation for Forests and Livelihoods”. I therefore thought I would take the opportunity, through this blog post, to highlight some of the most innovative and imaginative frameworks, tools, and approaches that I learned about in this three-day conference.

Since the opening keynote address, it became clear that innovation for forests and livelihoods can take many forms. We heard from Rukka Sombolinggi, Secretary General of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), who explained the work that her organization does to organize resistance against the governments and corporations that seek to control Indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands and practices in Indonesia. She also had the most potent call for imagining a different world: “Imagine a world where the Pope’s declaration of 1493, which ceded the sovereignty of much of the world’s Indigenous lands to Spain and Portugal, never happened. Where centuries of violence, slavery, and subjugation were replaced by respect and collaboration.” A recording of her complete address is available here.

A lot of innovation seems to be happening in the world of impact evaluation, where a lack of consistent baseline data and the urgency of combating climate change through often competing land-uses has given rise to things like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) methods, as was presented by a panelist from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Many others presented results from impact evaluations that used imaginative approaches for including demographic trends (like Johan Oldekop, who presented a study on migration and community forests in Nepal), comparing across different land governance regimes in Mexico (Lucas Alencar) and Peru (Pablo Negret Torres), and assessing the impact over time of community forests in Cambodia by normalizing their different start dates (Roberto Toto). And indeed, the closing plenary session included a participation by Sarobidy Rakotonarivo, Research Fellow and Lead at the Mitsilo Research Group, University of Antananarivo (Madagascar), who called for imagining “a culture of impact evaluation” to bridge the funding gap that is required to ensure that forests generate positive effects on forest-dependent peoples.

I was also struck by some of the innovative projects and initiatives that The Tenure Facility is supporting, which were presented in a session titled Innovations and Technology for Forest Governance and Livelihoods: Explore and Imagine with Tenure Facility. These included community-based biodiversity monitoring and video storytelling with a focus on the empowerment of women and youth. At a panel of FAO staff, they also presented the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring webpage, which contains a lot of useful data at the global level in an accessible format. And while this is not such a new tool, Alida O’Connor (University of British Columbia) and Malaika Yanou (Chalmers University of Technology) used the Global Person Generated Index (GPGI) in an innovative way by embedding it in semi-structured interviews to assess people’s priorities for landscapes in Ghana and Zambia, and in Brazil, respectively.
Finally, I reflect on the fact that sometimes innovation can involve simplifying existing bureaucratic structures. Sujoy Subroto (University of Calgary) explained this for the case of boat permits for communities that live and depend on mangroves in Bangladesh, where the government has imposed a number of processes and requirements that allow brokers to take advantage of villagers through corrupt practices. The distinguished scholar Sharachchandra (Sharad) Lele (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment) presented a similar situation for the case of India, where communities must develop forest management plans that are needlessly long, complex, and expensive. He presented a pilot project that consisted of co-developing a simplified format with communities, and brought us down to earth by explaining all the reasons why the government does not want to accept this proposal. Innovation, after all, is not enough to drive change.

About the author: Andrea Alatorre is a Mexican biologist and conservation scientist. She is currently pursuing a joint doctoral degree in Ecological Economics and Development Studies at the Université du Québec en Ouaouais (UQO) and the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy (IOB), respectively. Her research explores the role of incentive-based conservation strategies on the livelihoods of participating communities through mixed-methods and multiscale approaches.