Facilitating Local Learning and Knowledge Exchange

Local actors have critical knowledge and expertise, and have demonstrated successful application of this knowledge in sustainable natural resource management, energy provision, biodiversity conservation, and adaptation to climate change. However, local actors often lack the resources to effectively share their expertise, or may need incentives to begin sharing. Local best practice in isolation is opportunity lost. Facilitating the peer-to-peer sharing of best practice between local actors is a powerful tool of local empowerment and a highly effective means of scaling up best practice to meet the MDGs. UNDP experience shows that uptake time of a best practice can be reduced by half or more when shared peer-to-peer or community-to-community, allowing local actors to avoid past mistakes.

In its work with local actors, UNDP has frequently encountered a clear request from local communities for greater long-term and targeted investment in community-to-community knowledge exchange; as well as the need for UNDP to identify, analyze, systematize, and disseminate community knowledge and lessons learned as a way to influence policy and leverage resources. Assistance with knowledge management is thus one of the highest priorities voiced by local actors.

UNDP is uniquely positioned, and has the political space and mandate, to respond effectively to this demand by facilitating South-South knowledge exchange and the systematic analysis and communication of lessons learned. The Global Environment Facility-funded, UNDP-implemented Small Grants Programme (SGP), the Community Water Initiative, the Equator Initiative, and the Energy Access Programme all provide a wealth of communities—some 14,000 strong—from which to draw knowledge and experiences and extract best practices.

UNDP is undertaking the following activities in this area:

• Facilitating dialogues and visits between local groups and helping communities establish ongoing learning platforms for sharing best practices.
• Supporting the implementation of new knowledge and lessons learned when a good practice has been successfully shared between local actors.
• Establishing an integrated local-global learning and knowledge management facility to foster best practice information exchange among local communities and national and international policy makers.