Approach

Stakeholders from all levels of government, the private sector and civil society have worked together to develop the Grasslands strategy; believing its goal will be achieved if all involved work together across institutional boundaries. This will ensure inter-governmental coordination as well as the harmonisation of policies, legislation and actions in support of the common objective of sustainable development across the grasslands biome.

The strategic approach consists of the following elements:

• The overarching Grasslands Programme, which seeks to facilitate knowledge generation and sharing across institutions and sectors.
• An initial 5 year GEF-supported mainstreaming programme, which will be a core catalyst to complement and facilitate synergies between existing and proposed grassland biodiversity conservation initiatives.
• A phased approach to achieving long term programme objectives, which consists of two initial 5 year phases that focus on leveraging investments to consolidate progress and improve best practices. This will be followed by a 10 year phase to achieve the 20 year targets.
• A multi-stakeholder process and approach that operates across provincial boundaries and includes public, private and civil society sectors.
• Implementation at different scales that will focus the macro policy level on affecting systemic change; the market level on incentives; and the local level on demonstrating change on the ground. There will be a feedback loop between the 3 levels.