Major grant to Professor Stefano Ponte

The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Consultative Research Committee for Development Research (FFU) has awarded DKK 10 million of funding for the research and capacity building programme ‘New Partnerships for Sustainability’ (NEPSUS), coordinated by Stefano Ponte. The project is carried out in collaboration with the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

"New and more complex partnerships are emerging to address the sustainability of natural resource use in developing countries. These partnerships variously link donors, governments, community-based organizations, NGOs, business, certification agencies and other intermediaries. High expectations and many resources have been invested in these initiatives. Yet, we still do not know whether more complexity, including more sophisticated organizational structures and inclusive processes, has delivered better sustainability outcomes, and if so, in what sectors and under which circumstances. In particular, we need a greater understanding of: the role played by facilitators in forging these initiatives; how partnerships obtain and manage legitimacy in different arenas; and how these factors may result in different outcomes. To fill this knowledge gap and build capacity in this area, NEPSUS assembles a multidisciplinary team to analyze partnerships with different degrees of complexity through structured comparisons in three key natural resource sectors, with specific focus on Tanzania: wildlife, coastal resources and forestry. These sectors have established traditions for co-management and partnerships, but have also experienced recent innovations, and constitute important elements of rural livelihood strategies. Tanzania provides an ideal case for researching the impact of new partnerships on sustainability outcomes because policy and program implementation in these three sectors are heavily dependent on their success."

Further info by PI: Professor Stefano Ponte.