INTERFACES

INTERFACES is an accompanying project that supports four BMBF-funded regional research and development (R&D) projects in their endeavor to drive change for sustainable land management in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the heart of INTERFACES lies the recognition that to achieve changes towards sustainable land management, a fundamental reorganization across technological, economic political, institutional and social factors is needed, which also includes questioning existing paradigms, goals and values. For changes to be sustainable, they must be gender-responsive and socially inclusive, which means that implementation pathways for sustainable land management must be based on thorough gender and power analyses and lead to outcomes that benefit both women and men of different ethnicities, ages, classes, and income levels.

Therefore, INTERFACES’ support activities will be impact-driven and build on networking to strengthen the integration, coherence and reach of the regional projects with regard to sustainable land management. The outputs from INTERFACES are expected to include scientific and non-scientific publications, the promotion of transdisciplinary research and social learning approaches in order to produce research results that are relevant to practice, the strengthening of already existing networks on land management issues and linking them up with different African networks to further contribute to the implementation of the R&D results in the area of land management. Finally, INTERFACES will anchor implementation-oriented research in education and training.

INTERFACES spans all countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on West Africa. It has four work areas that together strengthen the integration, coherence and reach of the regional projects with regard to sustainable land management.

1. Knowledge synthesis through dialogues about future visions and theories of change for sustainable land management – together with the regional projects and actors from science, policy and practice
2. Support of innovation and implementation processes by identifying change strategies to bridge knowledge behaviour gaps
3. Communication, networking and knowledge management and support for gender mainstreaming across all regional projects
4. Education and capacity building, e.g. through the integration of teaching content into African and German graduate programs

The methods and results of the regional projects find their way into the training of project partners and students with regard to the training of future “change agents”.

Impact-driven Support Activities

• Development of future visions and impact models for sustainable land management (‘theories of change’) & alignment of research
• Shared learning through dialogues and the interfaces: science-policy-practice
• Knowledge management, science communication and networking with stakeholders in Africa and international organizations
• “Gender mainstreaming” – aligning research and implementation in a gender-sensitive way
• Training of change agents as multipliers for sustainable land management and implementation research including communication strategies & media competence

Implementation Research

• Intervention-specific impact pathways and impact predictions through quantitative models
• “Follow-the-innovation” from research to implementation (participatory observation of activities, shared learning, complementary activities)
• Understanding and developing of sociocultural appropriate and gender-sensitive strategies to bridge “knowledge-behavior gaps“ and achieve behavioral change: incentive systems for adoption, gender roles, norms, power dynamics in land management

Capacity Building

• Training of change agents
• Curricula development
• Workshops, lecture and seminar series