Building strong collaborations for transformative change
Building strong collaborations with similar projects and initiatives is at the heart of PLANET4B’s synergies strategy. The synergy strategy maps relevant projects and initiatives and through doing so, bridges a knowledge gap on what types of similar biodiversity relevant projects and initiatives exist.
How to identify, reach out to and decide to collaborate with analogous projects and initiatives were all questions that needed to be posed in the first months of the project. Growing the project’s impact through establishing joint activities with other partners has since been a key consideration to incorporate into PLANET4B’s activities.
To lay the foundations for this collaborative work, a database of projects and initiatives was created to identify and map similar projects and initiatives. This was then built upon within the synergies strategy and a seven-step process for identifying synergies and coordinating collaboration with external partners was elaborated.
Collaboration with other similar projects and initiatives can result in outputs that are greater than what could have been achieved separately. In this way, collaboration can produce results that can significantly increase the reach, impact and potential uptake of findings in decision making related to biodiversity. For example, cooperating to produce certain forms of new knowledge can increase the scope of expertise and applicability of findings and joint communication activities can boost the reach of the work and access new audiences.
Cross-fertilization of ideas between similar projects or initiatives may also pay dividends when it comes to the policy relevance of findings and the communication of policy relevant lessons to decision-makers. The impact of collaboration may therefore have a common European benefit in improving policy and decision-making in relation to biodiversity.
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Given the broad scope of topics addressed by PLANET4B, and their policy implications, the project lends itself to many different types of synergies-based collaboration with external partners. Collaboration with external partners will leverage synergies around four different types of cooperation; knowledge sharing, knowledge co-production, common dissemination and communication and actions leading to future collaboration. The synergies strategy lays out how discussing future collaboration with external partners may take the form of building on the results of PLANET4B through future project proposals or through the creation of networks to ensure the project’s knowledge is directly provided to new projects and initiatives.
Do you envisage ways of collaborating with PLANET4B? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us through our website or email address – we would love to hear from you!
To read PLANET4B’s full synergies strategy and to check out the identified projects and initiatives download it here.
Do you need quick information? Click here for the synergies strategy brief.
