News from the CEPA e-mail list

A new tool for CEPA Action Planning ......... (24/11/08)

Greetings CEPA list members:

“People taking action for the wise use of wetlands” is the long-standing vision of the Ramsar Convention’s CEPA Programme on Communication, Education, Participation and Awareness (CEPA) and it continues in the new programme adopted at COP10 for the period 2009-2015.

How can we best plan to make the Programme’s vision come true? For our Contracting Parties and their nominated government and NGO CEPA Focal Points, one of the key requirements of the programme is the development of an action plan at some level, national, sub-national (perhaps river basin for example), or local/site level. In some situations it may be more relevant to use another approach – building a site management action plan or a river basin plan that fully integrates essential CEPA components.

Whatever is developed, it is important to begin with well-designed and well-run participatory action planning processes that employ a range of effective techniques for facilitating what may be diverse multi-stakeholder groups. The advantages of such an approach? By using these facilitation techniques during the action planning process, people will be more likely to participate effectively, to feel ownership of the plan, and to build better attitudes and skills for communicating, learning and collaborating into the future as the plan is implemented.  

As mentioned in my recent email, we launched a tool during COP10 to assist the Convention in the action planning process. A Guide to Participatory Action Planning and Techniques for Facilitating Groups has been developed for the Convention by IUCN’s Learning and Leadership Unit with valuable input from the Commission on Education and Communication (CEC). A side event at COP10 presented the tool to 40 participants and had them actively use one of the techniques in the guide, and a similar exercise was carried at the European pre-COP Regional meeting. Now we are making the guide available in PDF format to everyone here http://www.ramsar.org/outreach_actionplanning_guide.pdf.

The 40 participants from COP10 have agreed to form a group of ‘testers’ and will be a core part of an email group that will be set up in the next few weeks to exchange comments and, particularly, experiences on the use of the tool, so that it can be further developed. For CEPA list members who are willing to test out all or parts of the guide, I would encourage you to join this list – I will remind list members about this when the group is launched.

The guide is currently being translated into French and Spanish and these should be ready in about one month.

Very briefly, the guide is divided into four parts:

It broadly includes:

In terms of its practical design, it includes many simple diagrams to illustrate techniques, a number of cross-referencing hyperlinks to help you move around easily within the guide, and hyperlinks to useful online resources.

This new guide complements the CEPA toolkit produced by IUCN’s CEC for the Convention on Biological Diversity, the latter providing tools concerning where, when and how to use a range of education and communication interventions (available here http://www.cepatoolkit.org/). Together, these two guides provide powerful tools for planning and delivering CEPA which will be valuable not only to Ramsar and the CBD, but also to the CEPA Programmes of the other Multilateral Environmental Agreements and to other CEPA planners.

With best wishes, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat

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Sandra Hails, CEPA Programme Officer
Ramsar Convention Secretariat
Rue Mauverney 28, CH-1196 Gland, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 999 0176; Fax: +41 22 999 0169
E-mail: hails@ramsar.org
Web Site: http://ramsar.org
CEPA mini-Web site: http://ramsar.org/outreach_index.htm

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