On 23 Oct, Jeannette Gurung is elected as the Co-Leader of The Forest Dialogue’s Steering Committee in Washington DC, USA. The Forests Dialogue (TFD) was created in 1998 to provide international leaders in the forest sector with an ongoing, multi-stakeholder dialogue (MSD) platform and process focused on developing mutual trust, a shared understanding, and collaborative solutions to challenges in achieving sustainable forest management and forest conservation around the world. TFD’s Steering Committee consists of up to 25 members and is led by two Co-Leaders. The Committee comprises a dedicated and passionate group of individuals who have been invited to join based on their leadership roles in the forest sector, or other related sectors. Committee members are chosen for their abilities to help build trust and a shared understanding within a collaborative environment.
The goal of TFD is to reduce conflict among stakeholders over the use and protection of vital forest resources. Over the past twelve years, TFD has brought together more than 2,500 diverse leaders to work through compelling forest issues in what we call Initiatives. TFD utilizes the multi-stakeholder dialogue (MSD) model to progress from building trust among participants to achieving substantive, tangible outcomes. A primary reason for TFD’s success is that participants are committed to advocate for and work to implement those consensus-based outcomes.
One of the recent TFD initiatives is the Exclusion and Inclusion of Women in Forest Sector (EIW). On Sept 2012, TFD in partnership with Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource organized a Scoping Dialogue on the Exclusion and Inclusion of Women in the Forest Sector to:
- Create a better understanding of the perceived advantages of and the constraints to including women in natural resource management;
- Identify areas of agreement as well as disagreement and to further develop recommendations that address specific stakeholder questions around gender and forestry;
- Draw up mutually agreed upon recommendations on how to include women at all levels in ways that can benefit forest-dependent communities and climate change interventions.
More info on TFD: http://tfd.yale.edu/