 Okay. So great. So this is a session where we are asking the question, how can we bridge the gap between Indigenous knowledge and devolved local government decision-making? Again, I'm Tom Smucker from Ohio University, and I'll serve as the session facilitator. I'm also involved in research from one of our presenters. And I'm joined today by a set of contributors who we're going to take on this question and to provide us their perspective and their experiences coming from different organizations and different national and local contexts in which they work. And all of them, I believe I've made co-hosts, so they should be able to share once I'm done with my short intro. But beyond our contributors, I also have seen, you know, that we have a really great group of participants as well. And so we're excited to get your perspectives. And so we'll have a more interactive forum after the opening presentations. We'll do a breakout discussion and try to get a handle on your experiences as well. It's really important that we hear a lot of different voices in this discussion, because it seems that this question about local and Indigenous knowledge in the practice and indeed research on adaptation is a very long-standing issue. It's one that has been talked about for really for decades. And increasingly, I think we hear practitioners speaking to the notion that local knowledge systems are very dynamic, right? They're not sort of static, and that they are evolving in interaction with external knowledge systems. And so there are discussions around integration of local and external knowledge systems. Questions about the power dynamics and power relationships, the wider institutional and cultural contexts in which knowledge claims are staked out and in which visions and aspirations for the future and for, you know, what we come to think of as adaptation to climate change, that those are articulated. So I'm very excited to hear about examples today in which local knowledge systems are centered in adaptation, but also examples in which the gap still remains to be bridged, right? In which local knowledge or Indigenous knowledge systems remain on the margins and some of the challenges for trying to build points of contact between local and Indigenous knowledge systems and adaptation practice. So I'm going to allow the presenters to introduce themselves. Let me give you a quick overview of where we're going with this session. So we're going to start with short opening statements or short presentations from our three sets of contributors. So Lori and Steve from Makeway, Doritay and Stefan from Friendship, and then Martin who will speak about our research in Kenya. So we're going from Canada to Bangladesh to Kenya and then we go to breakout groups. So we've got a set of three breakout groups and you'll be allowed to select the group that you enter and we're going to do some brainstorming around specific questions that our contributors will suggest. When we reconvene, we'll do a quick Mentimeter poll or kind of crowdsourcing of ideas around what prevents this kind of the centering of Indigenous and local knowledge systems to happen in adaptation and we'll hear kind of a recap from breakout group rapporteurs. So that's a quick overview of where we're heading. So without cutting too much more into the discussion time, the presentation time, I'm going to go ahead and hand the baton over to Lori and Steve from Makeway for their presentation on Arctic Indigenous Knowledge and Local Decision Making. So welcome, Lori and Steve. Hi, everyone. I'm Lori Tegongna with Makeway Foundation. I'm calling in from Iqalui Nunavut. My role focuses on grant making and relationship building across Inui Nunangat in the Canadian Arctic. And then I'll pass it over to Steve. Hi there, I'm Steve Ellis. I'm in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in the subarctic regions of Canada, quite a bit west of where Lori is located. I lead Makeway's Northern program, which works across the Northern subarctic and Arctic regions of Canada, primarily where Inuit peoples live as well as Northern First Nations or the other major Indigenous group in Canada. Lori is going to take this presentation away and then I'll bring it up. Just to confirm on the format, sorry, are we starting our presentation now or are all the panelists introducing themselves first? Sorry, yeah, you can, I think it's best just to go ahead with the presentation and then others will introduce themselves before their presentations. Thank you. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, we're good. I could start. Yeah, you want me to share, Thomas, would be better if we share the screen or you? What's your preference? I think you could share the screen, Steve. I think you were just... Okay, you can see it? Yes. Really nice photos, Steve. All right, you just tell me when you want me to advance, Lori. Okay, sounds good. First of all, I want to say thank you for inviting us and also thank you for dedicating time to speak about this. Like the focus of the session is how do we honor and value Indigenous knowledge systems with the regard that they deserve? How do we hold space for them? How do we integrate them? So like I think it's important to designate time, effort, resources into setting up spaces like this. So I think this is a good start. And as we were preparing for this, I was thinking which way can we approach this? How can we think about Indigenous knowledge systems, but also how can we use these systems as well as other knowledge systems to create more accurate, fuller pictures and make the best decisions based on the best available information data? And when I think about that, like there's our ecological science, or there's these other efforts for monitoring and data collection and understanding what is what is the state of the environment. Oftentimes this tells us very objective truths, whereas Indigenous knowledge systems often are about how do you act in this world? How do you behave? How do you live in this world? So in short, science says what is. Indigenous knowledge says how to be. And so with the work that we support in environmental monitoring and stewardship, oftentimes Indigenous groups are utilizing both systems. And so this concept really excites me because ultimately we care about our environment. We want to safeguard our resources. Like how do we do this? We utilize science and also we utilize Indigenous knowledge systems. And like when I think about the power and the value of knowledge systems, these are ancient truths. They've been built upon generation upon generation, and they tell us about like the natural cycles of the earth, of our environment. And I think sometimes we forget how deep and vast these truths are. And like the great value that comes with them. And like within the North, like land and sea activities, like they're still very much crucial or like foundational to our way of living and being. And hunters and harvesters, they are people who are experiencing the environment almost every day. They're the ones that are paying attention. They're the ones that carry the stories of our grandparents. So we see hunters and harvesters as being like key knowledge keepers. If we could move on to the next slide please. And like I was saying, like just as knowledge carriers in the past have these deep relationships, hunters and harvesters today like continue the relationship. They continue to interact with the environment. And they have these intimate relationships with all the beings. And even the non-living like elements of the environment. Like I've heard some folks regard different elements of the environment as extensions of their family. And they extend the same care they would for their siblings as they would for the environment. Next slide please. And then I'll pass it over to Steve to continue. Thanks Laurie. Yeah, so this is just following what Laurie was describing as the value of indigenous knowledge in k-arctic communities and environments. The preservation and the transmission of that knowledge is something that's absolutely critical to making sure that knowledge base, not only the knowledge base, but that base of values and ethics and the ways of being in relationship to land and water and animals are transmitted through generations. And so that stewardship ethic for care of environment, care of land, care of animals transmits as well. So it's not just knowledge about how the world or the environment works, it's knowledge about how we must behave in relation to that environment. And that's the key critical component of indigenous knowledge that what we'll reflect on a little bit later that often is the piece that's disregarded in local decisions. What we've seen across the k-arctic in indeed Canada over the past number of years has been a resurgence in formalized programming at the community level built around enabling and amplifying hunters, harvesters or stewards to go out and take care of their lands, to harvest, provide food security solutions to their communities, to monitor environmental change and so on. So these are often called guardian programs or ranger programs and so on and so forth. You know that there's other countries in the world that have similar sorts of programs, for example, Australia, which has a very robust Aboriginal ranger program called the Working on Country program. In Canada, there's a real movement to build these sorts of livelihoods and to formalize long-term programs that not only build livelihoods and jobs at the community level but really honor the knowledge and skills of indigenous peoples to caretake, watch and receive benefit from the lands and waters in which they live. So we're in the early days of these sorts of programs. This is one of the programs that we work with up in the northern regions of Baffin Islands and in the high arctic community of Arctic Bay, this program is called the Neltik Subteet, which as far as I understand means essentially those who care for or watch over the land. So while there's lots of depth of indigenous knowledge about how to be in relation to the land and water and as well as those long-standing intergenerational truths on how the water and land and animals are and behave, there remain very significant challenges to bring this knowledge into decision making and ultimately influencing policy programs. Some of those barriers include the fact that indigenous knowledge is often only considered valid when verified by western science. So I don't know how many times Laura and I have been in rooms where it's like, hey, what these elders have told us is right because we've done a scientific study that proved what they said was right, that our walls do pass through this straight at this time of year. We went out and did a scientific study to confirm that. So instead of honoring the knowledge systems at face value for the depth of data and information that they bring to bear, rather there's often effort to verify or validate that information using western scientific means, which from our perspective is a big waste of time running. If we just sort of understand that these systems are validated in of itself, we don't have to extend the resources to validate using western scientific means. The other fundamental challenge which I'm sure is a global challenge is that the policy and decision-making forms are ultimately ingrained in western european customs and processes. So while elders and land users and indigenous peoples may have really important knowledge to share, they ultimately need to bring that knowledge into decision-making systems which are founded in western bureaucratic ways of knowing and doing. And so the entry points for those knowledge systems into these frankly foreign policy-making forms or decision-making forms, the fit is not very good. One simple example is language. Often the best elders and land users speak their indigenous language and which holds a whole bunch of nuance and value and the ability to translate that nuance and value into often English or French in Canada anyway. Decision-making forms, a lot is lost. And another challenge is that Canada like many other countries in the world has been dramatically affected by the colonial effort, largely by the French and English in this nation. And indigenous peoples' cultures and knowledge systems have been compromised because of that. So the value of that knowledge to make sure that it remains as accurate and as useful for forming how people make decisions, it's important that the programming built to support these indigenous ways of knowing and doing are built to support the resurgence of knowledge systems going forward. So some of the stuff that Makeway likes to support in order to address some of these barriers is, as I mentioned, investing in indigenous cultural revitalization and intergenerational sharing programs. It's extremely important to sustain and rebuild these knowledge systems. This issue of policy-making forms being fundamentally western and bureaucratic and trying to enable the self-determination of indigenous peoples to ensure that they are building their own decision-making forms and governance systems and retaking control over business decision-making and policy in their territories, that's an ongoing effort in this country. And finally, it's very important that those elders and land users and hunters that Laurie spoke about are able to live full time on the land and maintain that relationship and ensure that the depth of their skill remains extremely high. So facilitating livelihoods that are related to the sustainable stewardship of intact land and marinescapes is extremely critical. So making sure that these people aren't forced into economic activities that take them off of the land and therefore take them away from their cultural knowledge. So we'll end it there, but just to indicate that Laurie and I will be hosting one of the breakout sessions and our theme will be focused on gender dynamics with respect to indigenous and local knowledge promotion and transmission. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks so much Laurie and Steve for that very interesting, those very interesting insights from the Northwest Territories of Canada. And we are pivoting next in South Asia. So we're actually heading to Bangladesh and Dorothea and Stefan. I'll allow them to introduce themselves and they're going to tell us about their work with friendship. Welcome Dorothea and Stefan. Yes, hello. So from the cold Arctic regions, we'll go to the hot regions of Bangladesh and present a completely different context of what friendship is actually doing in Bangladesh for the remote community. So in Bangladesh, in remote and unaddressed communities of Bangladesh, it's very difficult to define a very specific indigenous knowledge. Actually, there are knowledge depends on a whole set of cultural, social norms, environmental conditions, our economic practices, our agricultural practices. So bridging the gap with local decision making for appropriate climate adaptation measures is actually taking into account all these social norms, environmental context, but also taking into account the opinions, the needs and the vulnerability of these communities. What I would say is actually really taking into account the reality of the community because no policy for climate adaptation can be implemented correctly. If all the living conditions and values are not considered, and if the people within the communities don't understand the benefits for them. So this is on this big picture that the idea of this presentation is actually to show some very practical solutions that friendship is implementing to actually match the reality of the communities in remote areas of Bangladesh with the local decision makers. As you all know, Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable country to climate change, flood, cyclones and everything. It's a common known that Bangladesh is very vulnerable. And the government of Bangladesh is actually very aware of this vulnerability. For Bangladesh climate adaptation is really key for the country's development and future prosperity. As approved, there are many strategic plans and Bangladesh has a lot of experience regarding climate adaptation. I have put a list. I will not go into the details of all, but just for example, the Bangladesh climate change strategy and action plan sets out 44 plans to be taken by the country over the short, medium and long term. So the policy for climate adaptation in Bangladesh is probably one of the best in the world. But actually the implementation of these policies sometimes difficult because of different things like the first one is of course the geographical condition in some very remote communities on river islands. The communities are so remote, unaddressed, almost forgotten. There is nothing there, no infrastructure, nothing. So it's kind of there forgotten and it's difficult to implement even a climate change adaptation policy that is really needed. But it's so far that it's very difficult. Also the high population density makes sometimes implementation of policies and measures for climate adaptation really difficult because the pressure on the environment by the population is sometimes very high. In Bangladesh there is also a limited institutional capacity, although they're willing to do a lot of things that are limited sometimes in means, in funds and they cannot do everything that they want. Sometimes also in communities there is too low participation in these, in the measures taken for climate adaptation and it results in an inadequate process in the decision making not going, doing the right things at the right place. So it's difficult for an organization like Friendship to have an impact on these three points in blue, but it's most easy to have an impact on the points highlighted in green and that's what I will show here. To empower the communities to efficiently address climate change and have a say in local government decision making, so Friendship has put in place a whole series of mechanism tools that are generally more organizational and participatory. So the idea is really to put the focus on the local needs, to increase the participation of the local people. First put the women at the forefront because there are often unfortunately women are those suffering the most when there are disasters. So it's important that they should take some leadership in climate adaptation. So we'll really put a focus on women involving them those very simple tools, organizational tools that I will explain in a few minutes, to really the trust between all the stakeholders and stakeholders are mainly the communities and the local government. So the first initiative taken by Friendship is what we call CIDRR, it's community initiated disaster risk reduction. It's quite simple, it's actually groups of people working together to achieve more together than what they could do individually. Each and every individual has some knowledge and skills and these skills taken together can contribute to prevent a crisis and we mobilize the people through what we call Friendship Disaster Management Committees, they meet every month. We have the local people, the local government, people from the team of Friendship and also local elites, local people from different also different committees, government committees like the Union Disaster Management Committees, it's a government committee but they're acting maybe in a different area and so we make all these people come together, talk, think, find solutions, see where are the problems and together they can draw some plans and find solutions so that really the usually renewed and unheard vulnerable communities get more interest from the local government and they're able to put together a plan to respond to disaster and by involving government responsible people, sometimes we have very surprising outcomes like for example members of the Union Disaster Management Committees, they did not hesitate to take immediate decision to solve problems that were raised during these meetings. A very efficient tool for disaster preparedness is actually this participatory disaster risk assessment is actually making a list of the main hazards, vulnerabilities to natural disasters in the communities and you include the knowledge of the communities, you include their needs, the situation, the very particularities of each village and you prepare a plan, you find mitigation measures so that you really create, you build the plan together also with the authorities so that you really create an ownership and you strengthen the collision within the communities and solidarity is very very much important when the disaster strikes because you're sure that the response is adequate and everyone knows this role. Very quickly this is a summary that is you see everything so the blue triangle is actually the different phases so you have preparedness, you have the response and rehabilitation and at the top you have the transition to development, actually this is the resilience and to achieve that you blend everything and you blend these actions with three main actors who are the NGO, friendship, the community and the local government. Another tool that is quite efficient to address climate vulnerabilities in the communities is poverty maps which are drawn with the communities to identify the geographical and infrastructural barriers to their livelihoods and incomes. It's locally specific in each community, in each village, they identify for example a broken bridge, a broken road or a lack of market that will strengthen their vulnerability and the climate change and disaster and with this map they identify the problems, the solutions and they have a very clear tool to go to the local authorities and say okay here if you repair this road, if you build a market at this place you're sure the impact is great, you're sure the communities will be happy and they will be able to face the climate change or the climate disaster so it's very very nice advocacy tool. Another group is the Friendship Civil Society groups, it's actually a way to blend traditional practices, all social norms because in these communities you have you know a kind of heritage of how the community and the society structure with kind of hierarchy, traditions and you blend these traditional practices with modern knowledge and with modern concepts like prevention of early marriage, prevention of domestic violence, also access to government support because sometimes the community are not even aware that they are entitled to receive support from the government and we make them aware that they can get social safety net and with more income they're more prosperous and they can face any disaster that could strike and these groups also create a fictive link between government institution and local communities. Another tool that we use is actually World Meeting so again we gather people together in words and they can express their view on the budget of the local government so they can make suggestions so that the budget is designed in a way that they will also benefit from the actions taken by the local government because sometimes the budget is made in government offices very far away from the communities and it's not that they don't want to help them but they just don't think that these people may need something so it's actually bringing marginalized people a direct voice into the government decision making. Another way to another thing that friendship is doing is very simple, it's a scorecard rating the quality and the performance of the official service providers so the service they receive for the government they give a score and so it helps the government to improve their services and also to address to meet the expectation of the recipients of these services. I will come to my conclusion so friendship is really creating platforms and tools to ensure effective cooperation between communities and local governments. Communities they have no assaying decision making processes they are empowered for better climate adaptation and the local government they're also very often happy to be able to fulfill their commitment because sometimes they were just not not like they'd not done will but they were not aware and know they can take into consideration the remote communities and all this coming together it helps to implement the national plans that I have explained in the beginning and achieve a really to implement the national plans at a local level. So yeah thank you for listening I hope it was interesting and I will finish with the breakout group discussion that we will facilitate, Dorothy will facilitate that maybe you want to Dorothy to just speak it up from here Stefan thank you for your presentation and as you said indeed it's a very different context that's what Steve and Laurie were presenting but very exciting to see that there are the main messages come down to the to exactly the same and I look forward to have a breakout session where we can see you know and and learn from what our successes and failures and how then we make sure that that everything our communities know and have experienced that how can we bring that into decision making by a local and national government. Excellent thank you so much Dorothy and Stefan and so you've seen that question for breakout group two so if that is a tempting one for you think about following them into the second group our final presentation then is from Martin Oulu from University of Nairobi and Enscape Research and Martin is going to we're going to continue moving last we'll fly over the Indian Ocean and land in Kenya so welcome Martin. Thank you very much Tom so thank you very much once again everyone for having me my name is Martin Oulu my lecture at the University of Nairobi and I also work in research and consulting firm that's called Enscape. So I'll just make a presentation here on a based on a research that we did together with Tom. It's called Foundations for Convergence, a subnational collaboration on the nexus of climate change, GRR, and land restoration under multiple governments in Kenya. And so basically we're trying to understand how devolved governments in Kenya or county governments deal with the three issues of climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and land restoration. So how do they integrate these three issues at the local government level? And some of the things that we found out was for example that there is a very decentralized stakeholder landscape so there's a lot of stakeholders who are actively involved in this space but they are loosely organized around the National Disaster Management Authority which is a national body but there's also the county steering group that brings sort of together both the national county or local government and also civil societies together. And I think that we found out was that national commitments really do not infringe on the sort of the autonomy of local governments to prioritize their own activities so they have the leeway to sort of prioritize what activities they want to do without necessarily feeling that the national commitments are forcing them to do those things that they otherwise not do. And we also found that there's a lot of informal knowledge and information sharing but there are still challenges there. So just an overview of some of the legal framework that sort of shaped public participation in adaptation in Kenya. So we have a new constitution since 2010 and the constitution is quite progressive. It provides for you know a lot of areas which sort of enhances public participation including use of indigenous knowledge in decision making. So one of the things I mean it introduces the devolved system so we have about 47 you can call them local government or counties and one of the objectives of that devolution is to enhance participation of people in the exercise of the powers of the state. So the role of science and indigenous technology is recognized by the state and that the state is supposed to put in place affirmative action programs which are intended to ensure that minorities and minority minorities group actually take part in governance. And public participation has become a very critical aspect of you know national values and principles of governance and this is something that has been reinforced by many you know courts the aspect of public participation. We also have the protection of traditional knowledge and cultural expression act but unfortunately the act is more focused on you know how to deal with the issues of traditional knowledge especially in terms of access and the benefit sharing of the knowledge rather than how that knowledge is to be used in decision making. But we also have county public participation guidelines and in terms of climate change there is a climate change act 2016 which requires the application of indigenous knowledge related to climate change adaptation while formulating the national climate change action plan. Communities are also represented in the climate change council so this is sort of the highest national body that manages issues of climate change. But of course we know there's a difference between what's in papers in constitutions in law and what is actually being implemented on the ground. So this is what we were trying to understand the interaction between the disastrous reduction and climate change adaptation but we introduced another third dimension which is land restoration. And for us this was very interesting because the land restoration or dimension sort of bridges short-term risk reduction and the long-term livelihood adaptation. And in the three counties that we were working on that's in Kitui, Macquaini and Kajiado we found that you know the land restoration aspect actually builds on a lot of years of experience and indigenous knowledge and a lot of confidence that communities have in terms of managing land resources until they see that land restoration aspect as very key to them in bringing together the climate change adaptation aspect as well as the disastrous reduction aspect. And so land restoration was also very strong because a lot of it is locally led so the communities have been you know working in these areas implementing some of these you know land restoration activities like sand dams. And so that is a very good or strong opportunity for them to bring on board the indigenous knowledge and that gets taken up in terms of the projects that they are implementing. So in terms of where various institutions work what we found is that a lot of the organizations actually are not working alone so in whatever space they are working they find that there's already either a national institution doing the same thing or something complementary or county governments are already working in such areas as well as civil society organization. So essentially because of the nexus in which they work there's a lot of potential for collaboration between different institutions and different stakeholders. We also looked at some of the partnerships and you know sort of the power and influence pyramid. So what we found out was that many of the organizations actually the top tier in the pyramid is those organizations that sort of give policy direction but also influence make have influence in terms of funding. So a lot of the institutions actually believe of our that they actually work in those two key areas. Not many organizations say they only implement activities which is the bottom part of the pyramid. If you look at Kitu account for example there is no institution that mentioned that they are only implementers. So essentially all or most of the institutions feel that they are able to influence decision and they're also able to keep in and contribute some resources in order to implement either the activities that they work on jointly or those that they work on as individual institutions. And also so that therefore also shows that there's a lot of potential for collaboration and working together. So in terms of how you know vertical and horizontal integration there are a few organizations that are very critical in sort of trying to bridge the gap as have so one of them already mentioned is the National Drug Management Authority. But apart from that there is the county steering group group that sort of bring together not only the national government but also the county government and also civil society organizations. So that's an opportunity where there's a lot of joint thinking, joint planning, bringing together resources that they share and which they can then use to implement some of the activities that they implement. And at the lower levels we have the work development committees where a lot of times the communities get to get involved in decision making or at least their ideas get hard. We found very interesting cases for example in Macquaini where the communities actually approve projects that are to be implemented. They monitor and evaluate and even in cases where contractors are to be paid for before that happens the communities have to give you know the okay for that to happen. But this differs across counties. There are some counties which are the communities are not much involved but through this system we see that there are attempts to involve local communities and find ways in which the three areas of climate change, adaptation, disaster risk reduction and land restoration can actually be integrated. And another thing that we found was that at the community level especially the world levels where most projects get implemented it's almost not very easy to tell what aspect this climate change adaptation and what is the disaster risk reduction and what is land restoration because for the communities they see problems as problems and for them they would want those problems solved. So if it's a water access to water problem they do not separate and see why this is caused by climate change, land restoration and so on. And so you see a much more you know closer integration of the three aspects as compared to for example the national level. So just to summarize some of these some of the things that we saw especially in terms of indigenous knowledge and CBR's integration is that CBOs and the community members are representatives and to do participate in decision making but sometimes you know the level of participation and how much their voice gets to influence decision differ across counties by CBOs of course always be enhanced. Counties have sort of the leeway and the autonomy to prioritize their activities and plans so we didn't see you know national commitments you know affecting that very much but of course there's needs to consider sort of the range of overlapping agendas which sometimes have different funders and so on and find ways in which you know we can institutions can work together across these different agendas funders and so on to sort of enhance the signages. The ongoing efforts to sort of formalize some of these collaborations or institutional framework that we found out were sort of loose but of course sometimes trying to formalize might become counterproductive so while they are attempts to sort of have these formalized we still don't know whether that would the best approach or not. Another thing that we found is that there is knowledge sharing and information sharing both in formal and structured. Structured mainly through the early warning bulletins and so on but indigenous knowledge is still shared informally and I think one of the presenters already mentioned that there is still that sort of resistance to include indigenous knowledge into formal decision-making systems. So you might find that you know communities are represented to hold their bearers of indigenous knowledge but when you know decisions are made they tend to go without more scientific and formal knowledge systems. Some of the challenges that we found there's always risks in collaboration because of things like lack of rules of engagement how do we engage when you have conflicts how you deal with these conflicts and so on and then there is the poor access to and expertise in using climate change for projections for the region and of course this also goes to indigenous knowledge. We have communities that are able to predict rain for example but like I said a lot of times you know we tend to want to go with the scientific you know projections rather than more indigenous based systems. There's also no centralized platform for sharing the information so this is something that means I mean because of that lack of a centralized platform getting information about indigenous knowledge and so on and using them becomes a challenge and of course no formalized way of reserving and accessing the indigenous knowledge. Now we have for example the national museums that tries to do this but of course there's still that challenge of you know how do you access it what are the rights that the communities have and there's always that fear that you know the indigenous knowledge might be misused so there's still a lot of controversies about how to access and utilize that knowledge. So the breakout this thing is going to facilitate is what sort of partnership for quality. Excellent thank you so much Martin and I'm gonna we're running just a little bit behind. I'm going to go ahead and open up those breakout rooms but before you take off let me just share my screen with you again and you'll see all three of the breakout group questions. So we've got three questions again as a reminder. Lisa and Steve how do we integrate customary and local knowledge into local government and enable gender transformation? Stefan and Doritay how can customary knowledge be integrated to ensure local governments leave no one behind so broader questions about inclusion and then the third group with Martin and I partnerships and coalition building thinking about what partnerships or coalitions work best in promoting integration of indigenous and traditional knowledge and subnational policy making. So I think there are questions about policy and response to the policy that cut across these and I think it'd be interesting to explore you know I think in the Bangladesh and Kenya context you know sometimes we have very progressive policies at the national level but you know implementation in the local dynamics can still be a bit challenging so how important are those broader national policy frameworks in shaping those local dynamics. So the breakout groups are open so I would ask everybody should be able to file into the group that they've chosen the co-host the leaders of those discussions should be able to go into the breakout groups. If you see a group that looks like it's a bit overpopulated you might want to choose a smaller group just so we get an even distribution so we don't end up with breakout groups that are really tiny and others that are really large. Welcome back to the main session. I hope you had a stimulating discussion in your breakout group. We're going to give our reporters from the breakout group just a couple minutes they want to put together just a few highlights to share and then we can perhaps have some kind of intergroup observations or some additional questions that we can then sort of open it up into more of a forum. As they're doing that we actually have a mentimeter I've never done this before this is new to me but we'll see how it goes so as we're waiting just a couple of minutes here while our folks get ready to give us a quick recap of those breakout group discussions we have this question for a mentimeter and so the question is what prevents local government from engaging with traditional knowledge systems to guide adaptation. Very often we have very progressive NGOs that are articulating the need to incorporate local knowledge, indigenous knowledge systems into adaptation planning. What about on the government side what are some of the obstacles for sort of deeper government recognition and engagement around issues of knowledge systems and so if you go to menti.com on your phone or on your computer whatever device you have in front of you enter 58619842 you should see this question pop up and you can put in a short answer to that question if you'd like to do that. Okay and once we hear back from our breakout group reporters we'll see what what kinds of kind of rapid responses we got. Thomas excuse me the the code doesn't work for menti. Is that right? Okay maybe I have to have it. Yes the code is not working. Ah I see they've they've actually changed the code so that must have so this is a screen share so I'm going to now let me let me share the the current one okay so four two five eight one six five six apologies for that four two five eight one six five six okay um so let's see so in our first breakout group did you elect or appoint a someone to report back? We didn't quite get around to that but our time expired but I'll just be the repertoire I suppose. Okay so if you give us a quick recap Steve? Yeah I guess two main points I think we discussed is that the first is that I think often organizations or NGOs or whatever it might be that are providing some sort of intervention in a community and approaching it from a gender lens are trying to amplify women and girls voices or provide more opportunities for women and girls and provide more equity to learning girls but that's not always the case and certainly we discussed that sometimes the inequity or the lack of opportunity is is more slanted towards men so that's uh that's one theme that we talked about I think another key theme was that interventions that might be in the interest of generating gender equity outcomes may sometimes generate negative outcomes with respect to local self-determination and cultural integrity and vice versa initiatives that may be there to promote local custom and local traditional integrity or cultural integrity may sometimes be at odds with the objectives of cultural diversity and navigating those sometimes uncomplementary outcomes can be a challenge and people need to be mindful of that so I'll just leave it there and I think that sort of captures the main thing we were talking about. Excellent very good recap yeah for sure we sometimes talk about indigenous and local knowledge systems without recognizing how differentiated they are and thinking about difference within communities and certainly that's very important so thanks for that recap Steve. Over to you Dorite would you like to give us some highlights from your in the second breakout group. Yes we had an interesting discussion as well in our group I think that if you want to bring indigenous knowledge into the decision making it works from two sides so first of all from the community side you have you need to really bring in their their knowledge and their experience and their voice basically and so in order to do that they have to be recognized and there has to be some form of how we listen to them and how we can make sure that they get a seat at the decision making table and sometimes they need to be mobilized you know there needs to be some somebody that brings the communities together and gets the information and the data that are in the communities available to bring it out and bring it to the right instances to take it into the decision making so that comes not by itself but we need to look at how we can mobilize the communities and if you look at the at the side of the government there's also a lack of knowledge from the community side how the decision framework works in the government in all the stages you know where is the data that we collect where is it going and who is deciding what at what stage and how how does it come in the end to maybe the the national level so there's there's a lack of transparency so there's a lack of understanding maybe from both sides and if we can bridge that gap that would help but to bridge that gap you need also lots of trust so trust building is important as well so and in the end accountability as well if you if you look through the stages how how will we give the feedback and and how will yeah the decisions that are made be accountable of the data and the input of the communities where we started so actually it's a it's a process from both sides that is quite challenging and so you can you can see how often that there can be hiccups in that whole process absolutely thank you for that excellent recap and I think we're seeing some of those concerns as well reflected in the in the metameter these sort of flash answers that are scrolling across hopefully you're seeing those as well issues around trust and you know questions about who articulates local and traditional knowledge I think those are really really very critical thank you so much Dorothe and our third group group three Nelly I think what's going to give us a short recap yes welcome thanks so for group three we were discussing how on what partnerships of relations work best in promoting the integration of indigenous knowledge into subnational policy necki and we had you know feedback including as part of the preparatory stages assisting communities to understand that indigenous knowledge is very valuable so going through the process of convicting them that indigenous knowledge is indeed key and then further elaborating how how their indigenous indigenous knowledge can be used into policy necki so creating awareness as as the initial stage for that and then there is also agreement that this is a long-term process and therefore it requires long-term investment so just to be aware that you know this is probably not something that you can um realize in in the short term but rather it needs to be long-term planning and long-term investment uh there was an example given of our trepidate partnerships that have worked in other parts of the world particularly composed of community local government and NGOs and there has been some great successes in such trepidate partnerships so there's potential for this to be replicated in other countries as well then in terms of uh scale there was also another example given uh of the southern CSOs network which is a network of CSOs in the global south composed of national and subnational networks and they focus on advocacy and monitoring and implementation of policy so in a sense they're able to share experiences and lessons learned from the different countries and different continents and able to replicate best practices and staying away for things that don't don't work and then there was also feedback that for such partnerships to work it's important to build partnerships that are based on trust and and holistic approaches since holistic approaches usually you know deal with a whole lot more issues than individual issues in a sense this is going to be able to reach out to more people more communities and more needs so useful to have you know building the trust and then dealing with a whole range of issues based on the context and then the last feedback that we received is that uh undertaking community vulnerability assessments with the community has also been a useful tool in terms of helping the community to understand what their vulnerabilities are and further by helping them to design ideas for addressing the the challenges that they're having and so taking them through the whole process of understanding what the challenge is and then designing the interventions uh to get by and to bring them on board so very very uh provide feedback but I think the just to summarize is to say that uh such partnerships to work they can work at different scales at community local government scale as well as intercontinental scale thank you so over to you. Oh excellent thank you so much Nellie that was really an excellent report you captured a lot and it gets clear that there are a lot of you know different elements of this discussion you know not all of which touch directly on the question of policy and I think that to me is still sort of an open question about you know how important is that broader you know policy framework and policy advocacy relative to maybe the kinds of local efforts that people are doing or that organizations are doing perhaps desensitized local government in in a much more direct way even in the absence of kind of a more progressive policy framework so um we have some time now we don't have a lot we're a little bit behind but we do have about 10 minutes remaining and so since we're all back together I thought we could have an opportunity for folks to ask questions if you want to ask questions of any of the presenters from earlier in the session if there's a point that you'd like to you know try to identify maybe some connections between the breakout groups that would be most welcome as well so we can sort of open the floor for discussion and I'm going to let's see I'll look at my participant list here for folks if you want to just raise your hand and try to try to call on you and I'll stop sharing here questions for for any of our presenters or sort of issues that you felt were perhaps not not quite resolved coming out of your breakout groups yes I see Edel yes hi um I had a question for the first presenters Steven Laurie and I can remember that you mentioned that one of the um ways to overcome the challenges that you mentioned was uh developing self-determined governance systems I was wondering uh when these are developed how did they interact with the more yeah western I don't know how to phrase this but more western governance systems and how did the interaction evolve thank you yeah it's a big question I think the I would just say that there's a number of emerging or established self-goverting indigenous organizations or nations in this country there's sort of nations within nations they are very new and how they intersect with sort of state governments and public governments is very much a work in progress but effectively they've taken on a lot of the roles and responsibilities respect to land management education health social services so on and so forth but they are very much in the forming days and though on paper they are taking over lots of responsibilities it will be a multi-generational effort to actually make that happen um all that being said is that there are a number of of these self-governing indigenous nations arising in the country um primarily out of negotiated arrangements with the federal government of Canada thank you very much thank you Adele for that question other questions for our contributors um for this session I know for many of you it's been a long day of conferencing already maybe evening where you are um take a deep breath and see if we have some additional discussion between that might connect some of the issues that we've talked about so far if someone would also like to share an example of a success in terms of centering local knowledge and the work that the organization does um or a particular challenge that you found that you know something that may be inspired your your mentor comment um welcome that as well yes Chris I see your virtually yellow hand is raised welcome yeah thanks I mean I find um in venues like this we I think we all believe and understand the potential of indigenous knowledge ancestral knowledge invariably it's not being used and respected I think this is why we come to the conference and try and present our evidence um and and uh in one of the other sessions we're attending tomorrow we're suggesting that the solution is combining knowledge you know it's it's it's bringing people together and combining knowledge so to try and move forward so to sort of like to get rid of the polarization and the camps um in this I still think that is pragmatic way forward and especially perhaps to try and do that recognize and then a lot of context people operating in market systems where decision-making is sort of like by entrepreneurs and private sector actors and and they they they want to do that I mean I think that's what I was looking for in today's session I didn't hear too much of that I saw it more about what government can do what local government can do what institutions can do um but I think that private sector angle needs to be explored more we are trying to explore it with market systems facilitation where you bring together actors and get them to talk about how to use those market systems and use knowledge but it's still at risk the problem because as soon as you do that it's a push then towards more technology transfer and external non-indigenous knowledge which then compromises the indigenous not local knowledge so to share that um thank thank you chris in your your organization your practical action work with practical action maria goss is here she's from zimbabwe and she could probably talk to about seed systems where this is particularly the case because as soon as you try to sort of get that indigenous knowledge and seed systems which vulnerable and mine you know ethnic minorities use I think it's either can even be proprietary taken over I mean it can be patented and use that knowledge and then it suddenly becomes inaccessible yeah you might say something about that thank you chris um yes Sam I see your your hands up welcome yeah um yeah I thought I might share an experience and the challenge from northern Kenya actually so um there is a set of work that is now known as the county climate change funds in Kenya which started as a pilot program in isiolo uh the aim being to try to bring together local planning with uh finance to sort of bring those things together so that the planning has a purpose I mean that there were vulnerability assessments which integrated the local knowledge um uh with local Burana and Somali communities in wajia and they did quite a good job of uh similar to the work to work also done in Tanzania integrating the local knowledge and that pilot expanded expanded and now it has world bank funding and is being scaled up nationwide now that's great so now there is at least in principle a process for community participation that has financed at the end of it the problem the challenge is in scaling up um there is a tendency to dilute the planning processes that integrate the local knowledge because they're seen as time consuming they're more expensive uh the focus ends up being on the finance and then not the planning that ensures that there is quality to the finance so there is uh an interesting trade-off I think between the the setting up a system which can institutionalize the integration of indigenous knowledge into planning with the scaling it up nationwide where the old uh prejudice isn't the right word but assumptions about what's important come back into play and I thought it was quite an interesting experience to share very happy to share so if anyone is interested yeah very important example and if you just you know do a search for county climate change funds can you you'll find quite a lot of very interesting resources out there um clock is ticking down Maria's hand is up Maria would you like to make your comment here in our closing minutes no thank you so much for giving me this opportunity no I just wanted to just share a few experiences in the bubble we've been trying to get to document the evidence and get all the players who are into this nature-based solutions and indigenous knowledge system so that we can provide the evidence which policy makers are always asking that you always say that farmer-saved seeds varieties work but where's the evidence so we formed a community of practice and we've been trying to document and that has influenced the government enough for us to come up with we're in the process of developing an agroecology and organic farming policy under which these indigenous knowledge systems and farmer money systems are being considered but the thing is influencing the policy and getting it to be accepted and adopted like some said we end up losing some of the aspects because policy makers want the strategy to come out in a particular way and these have been practicing these technologies community-based technologies in response to the climate impacts and also in response to how they've been building resilience for decades but partners and other stakeholders really need to be influenced in terms of listening and taking cognizance of community needs and not just trying to impose issues so I think that that is something which is really of concern and I don't know how we can start influencing that positively and getting the policy makers to really sit up and listen to what the communities need and not what they think is needed thank you for the opportunity. Thank you so much Maria and that really resonates with much of the discussion in breakout group three which sort of touched also on you know sort of communities having confidence to kind of you know bring their suggestions or their ideas to the table that in some cases you know sort of what might be considered local or traditional knowledge system you know has such a long long history right centuries old history in some cases of being kind of marginalized pushed to the side not really part of the conversation of development and so this is a this is a very long-standing challenge in many cases this is kind of a historical sort of challenge that many societies face. All right well I don't see any other hands up I think we've covered quite a lot of territory a lot to think about oh I see Aisha Aisha would like to jump in and perhaps have our last word here. Chris Henderson was saying something about the the private side of you know participation in Bangladesh there is something called the PPP which is the private public private participation in development so they take on not community you know based policy making but definitely they are participating in big development projects like building bridges building dams building the like delta plan so there is a certain amount of public and private partnership in Bangladesh that's happening perhaps we could expect a little more from the private sector definitely but it's my it's a feeling I feel that and also that I do see that in Bangladesh there is a big hesitance in in the private sector becoming very involved in development so that was my little take in from what Mr Chris Henderson was saying so yeah so that's thank you for sharing that Aisha and certainly there we you know we do need to be thinking about sort of private sector engagement or you know around these sorts of issues you know with so much of the adaptation agenda it's really this you know increasingly I would say at the local scale this sort of you know intersection of government and non-governmental and and sort of private sector interests and agendas that we need to be mindful of we're we're over time in fact so let me just say that it's really been great engaging with all of you and thanks for sticking with us through this session thanks to Laurie and Steve from from Makeway and Dorte and Stefan from Friendship as well as Martin and Nairobi thanks to Sam Green for helping us to pull this session together really appreciate the guidance and I look forward to seeing you all in in a future session perhaps tomorrow great to meet many of you thanks very much