Natural Justice partner works to alleviate poverty and protect biodiversity

Natural Justice attended the Annual General Meeting of Phyto-Trade Africa from the 29th to the 31st of July. During the 3-day meeting, Gino Cocchiaro (Natural Justice) met with Phyto-Trade members to discuss their strategies on collaborations with communities in the bio-trade industry.

Natural Justice has previously presented on its work with communities, particularly on biocultural community protocols and biocultural dialogues, which has assisted communities set out terms for engagement with biotrade companies. Natural Justice will also be collaborating with Phyto-Trade Africa and the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Initiative on a programme of work that will identify best practice examples of ABS in southern Africa.

Phyto-Trade Africa is a trade association of the natural product industry in Southern Africa with an aim to alleviate poverty and protect biodiversity in the region by developing an industry that is not only economically successful but also ethical and sustainable.

Major Publication on Multi-Stakeholder Processes

Natural Justice’s co-facilitator of the African BCP Initiative, ETC COMPAS, has released a significant new publication, “Power Dynamics in Multi-Stakeholder Processes: A Balancing Act,” together with six other Dutch development NGOs. The publication, which has been released together with a web portal with relevant resources, summarises lessons learned from 12 multi-stakeholder process case studies in eight nations across Africa, Asia and Central America. The report includes documentation from two biocultural community protocol processes in Ghana and Kenya that Natural Justice supported. The web portal includes country case reports, videos and evaluation reports from the research programme. 

From the report, “this publication is a result of the Thematic Learning Programme (TLP) ‘Strategically dealing with power dynamics in multistakeholder processes’ (2011-2012) in which seven Dutch development NGOs investigated how they could address and incorporate a deeper understanding of these power dynamics in their work. This topic is important, because MSPs involve issues in complex contexts: land conflicts, natural resource conflicts or farmers at the bottom of the value chain. MSPs are not always harmonious; the stakes are generally higher for some than for others and the various actors may not necessarily have the same level of representation at the table. This TLP aimed to draw lessons for the different organizations involved and to enable them to deal better with power dynamics in MSPs.” 

The portal can be accessed here. The entire report can be downloaded here.

Introducing Biocultural Dialogues

On the 1st and 2nd of March, Natural Justice, the Union on Ethical Biotrade (UEBT) and GIZ hosted a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa to review a joint project on Biocultural Dialogues in Ethical Biotrade. The project focused on three pilot biotrade case studies of community-private sector dialogues in Madagascar, Peru and Brazil in 2011. The review meeting was led by Maria Julia Oliva (UEBT), Barbara Lassen (GIZ) and Johanna von Braun (Natural Justice) who facilitated the process of unearthing the lessons from the case studies for future work on Biocultural Dialogues. Gino Cocchiaro (Natural Justice) and Bern Guri (Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Development) presented further case studies involving dialogues with the private sector by traditional healers of Bushbuckridge (South Africa) and the Shea Nut harvesters of Ghana.

Participants included facilitators from Peru (Gabriela Salinas), Brazil (Luciana Alves) and Madagascar (Rina Razankolona) as well as international experts on biotrade and Access and Benefit Sharing from Brazil, Marcelo Salazar, (Instituto Socioambiental), Pierre du Plessis (CRIAA‐SA DC), Bern Guri (Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Development) and Kabir Bavikatte (Natural Justice). The project aimed to assess the potential role of Biocultural Dialogues as a tool to facilitate and strengthen community engagement with the private sector in ethical sourcing practices. 

The project sought to evaluate and further elaborate on the applicability of Biocultural Community Protocols in the first stage and Biocultural Dialogues in the second stage of biotrade supply chains and potentially Access and Benefit Sharing. The meeting concluded with the sketching of a framework for a Biocultural Dialogue approach as the second step after communities have embarked on the development of their Biocultural Community Protocols and a summary of the next steps for the project as a whole.