Posted on November, 13 2012

Last month the 4 Greater Mekong Programme (GMP) strategy leaders joined the 4 newly recruited Country Conservation Mangers in Phnom Penh for a meeting to discuss how a stronger conversation team can be built.

The discussion focused on:

1. sharing experiences and lessons-learned from each country program;
2. understanding of GMP strategy and its implementation at country level;
3. defining the role of the conservation program to improve implementation of the GMP strategy;
4. agreement on key GMP approaches (e.g, fund raising, incorporation of livelihood-based approaches, ELCS)

The one-day long discussion was a great opportunity for all GMP senior conservation stakeholders to meet and debate face-to-face. It helped the Conservation Managers to gain a better picture on the 4 strategies and their challenges in implementing them but also showed where the synergies between the strategies could be improved. The GMP strategy is ambitious and therefore it is crucial to have in place the human capacity (policy and expertise) that can deliver the work.

All 4 countries are facing similar challenges (Infrastructure Development, Economic Land Concession, Illegal trade, etc) and participants agreed that there is a need to promote more exchanges and lessons-learnt between countries with facilitation by the GMP regional team. This is to foster a more confident WWF team that can build on past experience and can deliver better quality outputs.

Gaps relating to the implementation of the conservation strategy were openly discussed and identification of the role of conservation managers and strategy leaders to continue support to the landscapes in terms of strategy and workplan. Country-teams emphasized the importance to have more support from the Regional team in terms of fund raising capacity and technical support. There is a need to have a more coordinate way to handle fund raising especially when knowing that competition for money is getting harder and harder.

Particular topics like the role of livelihoods-based work in conservation were discussed. It was asked whether ‘livelihoods activities were only a mean to reach conservation goals or also part of the conservation results?’ There was not enough time to respond to this important question and so the participants agreed to continue the discussion via a working group.

Debate also occurred over engagement with WWF stakeholders - national government cooperation has been the main approach used in the past. Meanwhile, with the rapid economic development, Conservation Managers agreed that engagement with civil society and private sector had to be further cultivated.

The one-day meeting was followed by a 2-day field visit in the Eastern Plain Landscape (EPL) facilitated by EPL Manager and his team. It was a very well organised visit and helped GMP colleagues to get a better picture of the EPL realities. The participants also engaged in a cross-border visit between EPL and work with Yok Don National Park (YDNP) to define the strategy on trans-boundary actions between YDNP and EPL.

The team agreed that such a meeting should be held on a regular basis (e.g. six-monthly) and on a rotational basis in each country office.