Participatory planning procedures are a cornerstone of rural development initiatives, particularly those related to natural resource management. Over the past 10 years, many public and private actors have emerged to facilitate participatory governance in rural India, such as CSOs, CBOs, SHGs, etc. By centering voices and wisdom of the rural communities at the forefront of experiencing climate change risks, it is believed that sustainable natural resource management plans can be charted out, as this process will improve communities’ stakes and ownership in their landscape sustainability.
However, the on-ground process of mobilizing diverse stakeholders in the community, facilitating conversations that lead to identification of shared struggles, resolution of conflicts, and discussions on plausible solutions is complex and tedious. Landscape stewards, who are entrusted with the responsibility of conducting this process in villages in India, often get drained in data collection and administration tasks, leaving them with little time for facilitating meaningful conversations with the community members. Moreover, in the context of natural resource management, the geospatial data of the landscape, with the potential to aid landscape stress identification, is often scattered across different sources and not weaved into an actionable landscape data story.
Commons Connect, a flagship tool under the CoRE Stack framework, enables landscape stewards to analyze social-ecological stresses in their micro-watersheds during PRA processes, using appropriate geospatial indicators that describe their landscapes. Hear one of our partner organizations, Utthan, working towards contextually relevant solutions for climate resilience and gender equity in Gujarat share their experience with using Commons Connect. Here is the Link to the video.
