From 9 to 14 June, KIT Institute, as a Knowledge Management partner for the Land-at-Scale (LAS) programme, participated in the annual LAS Exchange event which this year took place in Uganda.

Equitable and sustainable land governance is essential to achieving sustainable development and has a key role to play in strategies for sustainable livelihoods, food security, social and environmental justice, and gender equality. Through the Land-at-Scale programme, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) is supporting initiatives on land tenure security and access to land and natural resources for all, in 12 countries: Burundi, Burkina Faso, Chad, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Mali, Mozambique, Palestine, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda.

The LAS Exchange brought together partners from these countries to learn from each other and reflect together on how to scale up existing initiatives, with the aim of leading to more sustainable and just use of land, natural resources for food, housing and production and to reducing conflicts and competing claims over land.

Why include a knowledge management component?

In any programme, new knowledge is produced, and a knowledge management component helps capture it and turn it into accessible information for internal and external practitioners. (Demand driven) knowledge management has from the outset been a part of the Land-at-Scale programme. It has been set up as a tool for partners to:

• Help track results (ToC reflections, lessons learned, etc.)
• Inform national policy (policy papers, advocacy etc.)
• Feed into global debates on land governance (research papers, blog posts).

However, five years into the programme, with ‘demand driven’ at the centre of the activities, it is clear that each partner country has its own specific needs when it comes to knowledge management. By having adaptability built into the programming, KIT Institute as KM partner has been able to be flexible and work with partners to identify their specific interests and knowledge gaps. These have ranged from supporting the partners in Somalia in evaluating the operationalisation of gender in their program, to identifying a functional multidisciplinary approach to land tenure in Colombia. They also include identifying opportunities, constraints and the way forward for sustainable management of common natural resources in Chad, as well as drawing and documenting lessons learned from experiences with village land management committees in Mali. We are doing this by facilitating reflection workshops and writeshops, creating space for the partners to critically analyse their work using an adaptive programming approach, often resulting in knowledge products in the form of briefs, policy papers, manuals or blog posts.

The Land-at-Scale Exchange 2024

A fundamental element of the knowledge management component is learning and exchange. RVO promotes various platforms for such exchanges with different ways of learning. These include internal reflections at country project level through work- and writeshops to capture and reflect on outcomes and methods, as well as broader platforms where different country partners have the chance to exchange with each other and other actors in the land governance landscape.

Once a year, RVO organises the LAS Exchange, recognising the importance of bringing people together to build learning networks and foster a community of practice. The Exchange was organised together with UN-Habitat and the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) Uganda, giving partners the opportunity to go on a field trip to Butaleja in the east of the country. There, we got the chance to engage with representatives from project partners as well as land users involved in the project.

The last two days of the learning week were dedicated to the ILC (International Land Coalition) event, which focused on promoting collaborations between civil society and government entities. During these days, LAS partners had the opportunity to meet and exchange with representatives from more than 100 international NGOs and government entities from different countries around the world, including Liberia, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia. The last day of the event was dedicated to panel discussions, addressing key topics such as climate resilience, conflict, and gender and land. KIT’s gender advisor, Sandra Quintero, co-organized and presented the panel on Gender Transformative Approaches and Land.

In conclusion, the task of supporting partners’ knowledge management is both a challenging and rewarding one. Challenging in that it is hard for the many ambitious partners to allow for room to take a step back from the many operational day-to-day needs, and for us to figure out how best to design knowledge management interventions that will respond to their needs, while at the same time providing space for reflections and insights that might not otherwise have materialised. However, the reward is always greater than the efforts when we experience the benefits with partners of capturing and documenting the knowledge they have produced and using it to adapt activities and strategies. In-person gatherings like the Land-at-Scale Exchange enable us to multiply this work by identifying synergies, new collaborations and learnings. There is no doubt there is a special power and value of being able to come together and share knowledge.