Project Overview

Capacity building for REDD+ has consistently and frequently been cited as a key need by both REDD+ countries and donors, even since before UNFCC COP13 in Bali when REDD+ was formally entered the global climate change mitigation debate. The complexity of REDD+, and the wide range of stakeholders that must contribute to the design of the REDD+ mechanism, made it clear that the success of REDD+ would depend on extensive capacity building efforts. In recent years, governments and private sources committed large amounts for capacity building, but few efforts have been made to characterize the training that actually reaches the ground.

Recognizing this gap, The Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) provided a grant to support the Alliance for Global REDD+ Capacity (AGRC) to conduct an inventory of REDD+ training activities in representative countries around the world. The grant was made to the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) and OTS worked with AGRC members Conservation International (CI) and The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC), to design and implement a survey of REDD+ training availability and needs. These organizations jointly designed a brief web survey and detailed structured interview questions and sought out experts familiar with REDD+ training initiatives in various countries.

There is currently a strong movement to push countries beyond the readiness to the implementation phase of REDD+, where countries will be compensated based on their success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from forests. Our study shows that there are still substantial training needs in REDD+ countries, and that the countries where we conducted surveys and interviews have not completed the process of training stakeholders for REDD+ implementation. We intentionally chose to do this study in large countries like the DRC and Indonesia that have received substantial funding for REDD+ as well as smaller countries in which there have been smaller REDD+ investments by the international community. The finding that significant additional capacity building is needed was consistent across all countries.

There are important differences in the themes that have been covered by REDD+ training in the study countries, as well as different perceptions about priority needs for the future. Experts in some countries highlighted a need for more specialized training in technical areas, while others indicated that there is still a large need to reach a broad set of stakeholders with general training on the REDD+ mechanism.

The formats used for training have been heavily based on in-person methods like workshops. These methods are often considered to be successful, but are costly to apply at scale. Broadcast methods and the internet have not been widely used in the six countries studied, and it appears that there is significant potential to meet some of the unmet needs with these training formats.

A link to the full report and country summaries