First published on 08/01/2015, and last updated on 09/06/2018
By: Sergio Couto González, ICCA Consortium Coordinator for the Mediterranean region and
member of the Steering Committee of Iniciativa Comunales.
Conservation experts from all over the world gathered for the “Little Sydney: Protecting Nature in Europe” conference, which took place in Hainburg/Donau-Auen National Park, Austria from 28-31 May 2015. The conference built on the outcomes of the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014 (WPC), held in Sydney in November 2014, and which resulted in the Promise of Sydney. A document that you should not miss is also the Strategy of innovative approaches and recommendations to enhance the diversity, quality and vitality of governance in the next decade, the summary result of the Congress’ Governance Stream.
In Little Sydney, more than 200 participants from over 37 countries were present to explore further the outcomes of the WPC Streams and other cross-cutting themes of particular relevance for Europe. Little Sydney was thus organized around four key themes: Reaching Conservation Goals, Supporting Human Life, Influencing Policy and Institutional Responses, and Partnerships, Governance, Capacity Development and Resources, which introduced the key findings from the IUCN World Parks Congress and discussed how to bring out and implement the Promise of Sydney in Europe.
The Consortium and ICCAs were present in several plenary sessions and workshops. The first day, our Global Coordinator, Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend presented a plenary session report entitled “Enhancing diversity, quality and vitality of governance of protected and conserved areas”, which provided a vital point of reference for the conference in terms of governance.
Regarding the workshop sessions, although all of them were interesting we would like to highlight two of them that focused specifically on governance and/or ICCAs. One of them was organized by the Consortium (Working session 3A2): Towards harmonising agricultural and biodiversity policies in Europe. It discussed the fact that current EU policies have an enormous potential to support or hinder the communal governance and management practices that – through the centuries – have conserved nature and culture in Europe. Such practices are still providing ecosystem services to the environment of Europe and to its peoples. The session provided a broad assessment of the communal governance phenomenon in Europe and an exploration of specific threats and opportunities to promote more diverse and successful governance systems for conserved European environments. In this light, the EU agricultural policies were specifically examined and discussed, mainly on the basis of the recent Consortium- sponsored report “ICCAs and EU Policy: Impacts, leverage points, recommendations, meaningful initiatives and tools for awareness and action” by our Honorary Member Concha Salguero. The report is currently under a peer review process and is expected to be available in final version by fall of 2015.
Another outstanding workshop was the one presented on Diversification of Natura 2000 governance models, organized by the Consortium Member, ProPARK (Romania). The aim of this session was to identify possible improvements for governance of Natura 2000 sites. Several governance models for Natura sites were presented, and the discussion highlighted the need for a specific policy on governance of protected and conserved areas at the EU level.
While waiting for the full report on the conclusion of the conference – expected to be available soon – I would like to advance some of the most relevant conclusions and topics from my subjective point of view. It is clear that governance of protected and conserved areas is gaining weight in our understanding of pathways to achieve conservation goals in Europe… but for some of us this is not new. What is instead relatively new and becoming more and more apparent is that EU policies in general, even beyond environmental policies, have a major role to play in helping or hindering us to achieve conservation goals. All of us, as citizens and part of collective civil society in Europe, should understand which policies affect our environment and how. For instance, the Rural Development Policy and Common Agricultural Policy promote and finance initiatives that have detrimental consequences for our environment. Can we remain silent while this is going on?
Also relatively new is the fact that “the commons”— areas legally or customarily governed by local communities or indigenous peoples (as is the case in northern Europe) — are becoming recognized as being much more important in terms of coverage and environmental and socio-economic results than previously expected. Data is still inconclusive, however, and urgent and supplementary efforts should be made at European level to identify and support the potential of “the commons” to be, to all effects, community based effective biodiversity conservation measures (cfr. CBD Aichi Target 11), within or outside national protected area systems. Furthermore, “the commons” can contribute to other social goals in Europe such as direct democracy and participation, rural development and true engagement of communities in environmental policies and governance for conservation of nature.
