Theme 7-1: Capacity, Institutions and Innovations for Sustainable Development--Oral Sessions

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For several decades, interventions geared towards the development of drylands have been the catalysts of much change in a rapidly evolving world, and learning how to build sustainable trajectories that take into account both cultural and contextual variations is becoming of increasingly great import. As local problems become intertwined, and given the difficulty of large-scale collective action, understanding these dynamics requires cognizance of all levels of knowledge governance systems and their interactions. So far as rangelands are concerned, the lack of easily accessible documentation encompassing all knowledge to date is a major impediment to their sustainable development. With this in mind, polycentric governance would allow for centralized decision-making, which would then give rise to solutions that could be adapted to local conditions. Recent advances in technology and the proliferation of data are creating new opportunities for monitoring the progress and performance of multi-scale development efforts, and indeed new and non-traditional data sources will be paramount to the success of such endeavours. For instance, participatory observation is an emerging example of a non-traditional data source that is already making a significant contribution, and has fostered engagement at the community level. We seek to demonstrate the value of implementing transdisciplinary observation mechanisms—here, in relation to Southern Countries’ pastoral systems—and to provide concrete examples of how such mechanisms can be adopted for mainstreaming the use of data from a variety of sources, thereby facilitating the implementation of a sustainable development agenda as part of a continuous learning process. This project has been managed within the framework of the Agadir Platform, infrastructure supported and implemented by Ibn-Zohr University, Morocco.

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A Network of Transdisciplinary Observation Mechanisms as a Digital Source of Knowledge on Rangeland, to Communicate and Exchange at Local, Regional and Global Scales

For several decades, interventions geared towards the development of drylands have been the catalysts of much change in a rapidly evolving world, and learning how to build sustainable trajectories that take into account both cultural and contextual variations is becoming of increasingly great import. As local problems become intertwined, and given the difficulty of large-scale collective action, understanding these dynamics requires cognizance of all levels of knowledge governance systems and their interactions. So far as rangelands are concerned, the lack of easily accessible documentation encompassing all knowledge to date is a major impediment to their sustainable development. With this in mind, polycentric governance would allow for centralized decision-making, which would then give rise to solutions that could be adapted to local conditions. Recent advances in technology and the proliferation of data are creating new opportunities for monitoring the progress and performance of multi-scale development efforts, and indeed new and non-traditional data sources will be paramount to the success of such endeavours. For instance, participatory observation is an emerging example of a non-traditional data source that is already making a significant contribution, and has fostered engagement at the community level. We seek to demonstrate the value of implementing transdisciplinary observation mechanisms—here, in relation to Southern Countries’ pastoral systems—and to provide concrete examples of how such mechanisms can be adopted for mainstreaming the use of data from a variety of sources, thereby facilitating the implementation of a sustainable development agenda as part of a continuous learning process. This project has been managed within the framework of the Agadir Platform, infrastructure supported and implemented by Ibn-Zohr University, Morocco.