Dryland Forestry

This initiative aims at empowering communities to document their restoration journey enabling long-term transformational change towards sustainable land and forest management. By adopting a learning-by-doing approach, FAO’s use of the participatory video approach in the Making every voice count for adaptive management initiative will help countries capture the current landscape conditions and monitor the change throughout the project's lifetime. 

The Participatory Transformation - Agents of Change

Making every voice count for adaptive management (MEV-CAM) aims to give close and structured attention to document not only in writing but also in a visual medium. Through this process, stakeholder groups at the local, regional, and national levels can gain new insights, learn lessons, and overcome obstacles that can be used to guide dialogue, document knowledge, and influence policy and decision-making processes.

Communication, monitoring, and evaluation work is largely done through words; we write, we discuss, we present, we represent, we inform, we reflect, and then we disseminate. Simply put, most of this is only limited to words, either vocally or in texts/reports. The most important stakeholders, the members of the community, might not be served by these tools. It is undeniable that these written texts are important, but other forms of communication should also be considered. The most important of these are videos, in particular participatory videos.