Stewardship was the organizing theme of the Congress, covering a wide range of activities designed to understand, protect, and enhance cultural and natural heritage. Stewardship – efforts to create, nurture, and enable responsibility in landowners and resource-users to manage and protect land and its natural and cultural resources – is central to achieving QLF goals in community-based conservation.
The Stewardship Workshop was designed to bring out the best thinking in six thematic streams:
- New Directions in Protected Areas: Protected Landscapes and Partnership Parks
- Individual Responsibility: Private Land Stewardship
- Local Stewardship: Community-based Natural resource Management
- The Nature in Us: Cultural Heritage and Communities
- Our Living Planet: Biodiversity and Nature Conservation
- Engaging the Next Generation: Environmental Education
What do new marine reserves in Belize, archaeological sites in Israel and Palestine, heritage rivers in Canada, and rural Carpathian landscapes have in common? All have people striving to manage and protect them and many of the people doing that work are QLF Alumni.
One of the objectives of the Congress was to provide QLF alumni and partners an opportunity to discuss issues in common based on a global stewardship theme. An underlying assumption in much of QLF's work to promote conservation through exchange of experience is that there are certain fundamental universalities in the balance of people and nature. This objective was an important bridge between the other two objectives of the Congress: to meet each other across four continents and 30 countries, and, hopefully, to find new ways of working together, either through QLF or directly.
The Workshop sought to draw on the diversity of experience and regions represented at the Congress to explore new directions in stewardship. The six current workshop sessions were intended to provide a forum for Congress participants to:
- Share examples of best practices and innovative work in the broad area stewardship;
- Discuss the strengths and challenges of these common approached while teasing out some common threads; and
- Explore opportunities to work together.
Quite simply, QLF fostered an exchange of experience and ideas. With so many people from so many varied places and just one day, a mechanism was required to allow meaningful conversations to take place in these thematic areas. Dividing the day into six streams ensured that each workshop group would have about 20 participants. QLF staff took the lead as Focal Points for each session and worked with presenters in advance to ensure that the agenda for the sessions would reflect the diverse experience of our alumni and partners.
Each of the streams was designated to be participatory, combining presentations with interactive elements including working groups and discussions. Presenters were asked to address several pre-workshop questions to form the basis for discussion in small groups. Workshop participants considered three themes, which cut across all the workshop streams:
- Fostering participation and civic engagement in conservation
- How stewardship approaches contribute to building/strengthening civil society and
- Crossing boundaries (geographic, cultural, or between disciplines)
To give participants a sense of all six workshop streams, volunteers gave brief summary reports in a plenary session the next day. These ranged from reportage to creative expression. The group on Cultural Heritage presented a quilt they had created with patches expressing their individual and collective sense of cultural heritage conservation and QLF's role in this field. Space does not allow details of the six workshops, but all were described as being full of energy, of “aha” moments when participants made new conceptual connections, and inspiration at what others are accomplishing against difficult obstacles. Many participants made plans to continue communicating and interacting after the workshops, either through QLF or directly, with several joint project ideas hatched.
Participants on the Environmental and Landscape Stewardship Field Visit conclude the planting ceremony. Kiskunság National Park, Day Two. Photograph © Greig Cranna