Upcoming Strategic Plan signals a "new era" for the Center

On 20 August 2018, Dr. David Ganz, the Executive Director of The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC), announced the Center’s upcoming five year Strategic Plan (2018 - 2023).

“We need to be innovative, we need to be cutting edge,” noted Dr. Ganz in his address, which took place at the end of the Center’s novel People and Forests Forum, an initiative that brought together stakeholders often overlooked in the forestry sector.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Center will focus on achieving four strategic goals that act as guides for the Center’s new position in the field of forestry and environmental policy. The new strategy and direction are based on 30 years of experiences and collaboration with key partners that the Center has cultivated and will continue to foster.

In addition to focusing on forest ecosystems, the Center’s new approach will incorporate the landscape framework, which allows the Center to focus more on the original mandate: people and forests. By focusing on the landscape, which is part of strategic goal 1, the other three goals dictate how this is to be done.

Goal 2 represents the Center’s desire to ensure stable and secure forestry governance mechanisms throughout the Asia - Pacific Region. To do so, however, institutions must include all stakeholder voices, including the private sector (goal three), both local and regional, and the youth and urban consumers (goal four). The latter, which is oftentimes left out of the conversation surrounding forestry and landscape conservation, is imperative if the global community is to achieve the acknowledged Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

For this reason, the Center has emphasized the necessity of our strategic goal four in particular: social inclusion, gender equity, and public action, which is dedicated to ensuring that marginalized voices, throughout all of the goals, are heard and that urban consumers realize their role in our humanity’s collective future. This, as Ganz notes, requires a “strong advocacy approach,” a path that is new, yet necessary, for the Center.

Nonetheless, the Center, speaking through Dr. Ganz, believes that “this strategic plan will align well with business and government commitments,” noting the importance of achieving goal one, two and three under the direction of goal four.