Policy making for sustainable community development in Colombia
Colombia’s Pacific coast is a world centre of biodiversity facing multiple threats. In this context, we focus on the development of community projects that are sustainable, economically, socially and environmentally. Interventions of this sort often fail as soon as funding ends, due to lack of community ownership, lack of capacity, and/or asymmetrical relationships with planners. We seek to promote a different policy approach emphasising the value of social franchising and cooperative models, centred on food security and based on current good practice, that have potential for scale-up across the region.
On the 3rd and 4th March 2022, we ran a hybrid event between Newcastle University, Northumbria University, the Colombian Institute for Environmental Research of the Pacific (IIAP) and the University of Los Andes, Bogotá. The aim of the event was to explore the potential business models that might be suitable for community initiatives along the Pacific Coast and to identify funding avenues that could support such initiatives, in line with the overall aim of the project to develop a social incubator and accelerator in the region. It is vital that any project be designed and delivered in direct partnership with local communities and so attendees at the event included local entrepreneurs and community leaders from the region. Also in attendance were representatives from the Sistema General de Regalías, the OECD and the Research Funding Development Manager from Newcastle, who provided an institutional perspective on funding initiatives.
Relationships between community initiatives and such institutions can often be temporary and unstable and so one of the outcomes from the discussions was the agreed-upon need for long-lasting partnerships and funding streams that help initiatives to sustain themselves beyond the duration of special projects and to scale-up their activities. Finding and applying for funding opportunities can be complicated and time consuming, though. This is where academic partners can provide support, and participants at the event included professors, lecturers and postdoctoral fellows from a number of international universities, including the Universidad del Cauca, the Universidad Claretiana, the Co-operative College, Newcastle University, Northumbria University, the Universidad de los Andes, UC Davis and Sheffield University.
Most importantly, the discussions highlighted the clear need for projects that were socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. A clear set of criteria emerged during discussions, including the following principles for any community initiative. Firstly, it must be grounded within the community that it serves and it must benefit them directly. To do so, the agenda must be agreed upon by all involved and the initiative should be planned, managed and maintained by the community, with any training or support provided from the start by their institutional and academic partners. Secondly, the initiative must respect the territory, meaning the social and environmental characteristics of the particular places involved in the project and ensuring that they are protected through the initiative. Thirdly, good communication must be maintained. This applies to communications between community initiatives and institutional partners, but also to communications between different community initiatives working towards a similar goal. Thus, a means of sharing experiences, best practices, recurring obstacles and resources would be beneficial to all involved.
The next steps for the project include establishing a Delphi panel and selecting a small number of key projects to pilot.
