Strategizing for Policy Shifts in Odisha, India:
Pursuing systems change to enhance rural livelihoods and increase women’s voices in environmental decision making
Overview
In India’s Odisha State (population 46 million), one third of communities depend on the ecological Commons to meet basic needs and to maintain livelihoods. Yet, systemic challenges such as political inertia, power centralization, marginalization of women and tribal groups, and conflict among resource users have contributed to the degradation of this critical network of forests and agricultural landscapes, rivers and coastal ecosystems.
Through a longstanding partnership, CoRe supports the Promise of Commons initiative, anchored by the Foundation for Ecological Security , which works across local, state, and national levels to advance landscape restoration, livelihood resilience, and inclusive, democratic governance in India.
As part of this collaboration, CoRe has used its expertise in systems change analysis to co-develop and field-test guidance for practitioners to help FES and its partners catalyze action for improved environmental governance and rural livelihoods in multiple states across India. As this partnership has matured, CoRe has been supporting the transformation of environmental governance in Odisha through a cycle of design, action, and learning.
Since 2020, FES and its partners in Odisha have applied the systems change analysis approach to build a coalition for change, debate and map joint strategies, and assess progress. This has led to critical state-level policy outcomes, supporting increases in rural incomes, and stronger women’s representation in environmental governance.
““How can we work together towards a vision of securing common resources, particularly forest resources, and building a more climate resilient community, economic opportunities and livelihoods for local people?””
Establishing a foundation for systems change
When FES started working in Odisha, civil society was mobilizing to collaborate with local institutions, but communities had not yet reached consensus around a cohesive vision and strategy to bring about change. FES worked to consolidate this grassroots movement and focus its approach, with CoRe supporting civil society mobilization by leveraging our deep experience with systems change analysis.
Supporting the development of a cohesive vision
CoRe’s approach to Systems Change Analysis follows six stages.
Working with key stakeholders throughout the state, such as self-help group leaders, forest rights advocates, local development planning leaders, media, and other civil society organizations, with CoRe’s support, FES guided partners in articulating and coalescing around a shared vision for the future.
Through visioning exercises, contextual analysis, interviews and consultative workshops, CoRe worked with the FES state team in Odisha to help these actors identify the realities of the environmental governance system within the state and define what a desired transformation would mean for them.
As a result, key stakeholders in Odisha developed a vision to pursue jointly: “Secured Commons for a climate-resilient ecosystem, economy, and sustainable livelihoods”.
Developing pathways towards systems change
Once civil society actors in Odisha had developed a shared vision for change, CoRe worked with FES to support these stakeholders in assessing who is likely to support or oppose their vision for systems change. This group included representatives from marginalized groups, such as women’s collectives and indigenous peoples’ rights groups.
In the third phase of systems change analysis, civil society partners worked to understand challenges to achieving the shared vision that they had articulated and to develop pathways for overcoming these challenges.
Key challenges identified through FES’ work with stakeholders across the state included encroachment onto the Commons despite legal provisions, lack of accountability, barriers to women’s participation in natural resource governance, and a need for public awareness about protecting the Commons.
Stakeholders then moved from identifying barriers to developing concrete pathways to address them, such as through evidence and coalition building.
Towards concrete actions and a winning coalition
After defining pathways to change, CoRe supported FES to help key stakeholders outline how this systems change would take place. Specifically, CoRe supported civil society actors in identifyin intermediate shifts needed to achieve their goals while contributing to feedback loops to reinforce positive change in the state’s forest management system.
Key stakeholders in Odisha designed a pathway centered on three areas: technology, awareness campaigns, and multi-actor platforms.
In implementing pathways to change, FES and CoRe supported stakeholders in Odisha to build a “winning coalition” for systems change and identify concrete actions towards transforming governance of the Commons, especially the state’s forest management system.
Civil society partners devised outcome targets, indicators, and tangible steps for overcoming opposition.
Learning and adapting together for the future
FES and CoRe continue to work with communities in Odisha to identify clear lessons from their experiences so far, plan actions going forward, and adapt their strategies using grounded data.
The essential questions include: How can we be sure that we are making an impact? What new obstacles are we facing? How should we adapt to grow our impact?
Policy and Institutional Outcomes
In Odisha, the action plans from the systems change analysis process served as a critical foundation for advocacy and engagement in governance reform, helping civil society partners to achieve concrete policy and institutional wins:
The Mo Jungle Jami Yojana (MJJY) program, co-designed by the Promise of Commons coalition and the government of Odisha, was launched by the state government in February 2023. The program aims to expand land tenure security and access to forest resources for tribal peoples and other forest-dwelling communities in order to boost their livelihoods and food security. The program includes inputs to operational guidelines and implementation architecture, with guided mentoring platforms established with more than 100 master trainers. This policy achievement represents state-level recognition of years long efforts by the Promise of Commons coalition and is a significant marker of progress. Over two years, the program aims to impact 12 million people across 32,562 villages in the state by recognizing individual forest rights and community forest resources over 6.4 million acres of forest lands.
The state Agriculture Department and the Odisha State Livelihood Mission have made substantial investments to support sustainable rainfed agriculture. Starting in 2018, FES has partnered with both government entities to train functionaries, including women agricultural extension workers, on crop planning and water use.
In November 2023, the government of Odisha issued enabling orders to align development planning with the Sustainable Development Goals and integrate plans for land restoration and rural employment– a key result of the influence of the Promise of Commons coalition. This enables district and sub-district actors to better access funding and technical support for landscape regeneration and livelihood development based on the Commons.
Community-level Outcomes
These early policy victories, and CoRe’s systems change work with the FES state team in Odisha, are contributing to tangible outcomes in the lives of rural communities. Monitoring and evaluation evidence has identified, as of March 2024:
New access rights for water and forest resources across some 10 million acres
Increased women’s leadership in forest management institutions and decisions for nearly 1,200 women
A rise in rural incomes by as much as 30%, including enhanced opportunities for a quarter of a million people, including a focus on women’s entrepreneurship for 120,000 women
FES (and its predecessor organization) has been active in Odisha for over 3 decades, so these results include the cumulative effect of long-running efforts at the community and district levels. With the support of CoRe and the systems change analysis approach, these efforts have expanded under the Promise of Commons initiative to more systematically address coalition building and engagement with state-level institutions. Teasing out how to measure the additional value of these policy and institutional engagements in contributing towards enhanced community-level outcomes is a frontier methodological challenge that CoRe and FES are working to address together.
““We started negotiating to ensure that the management and governance of forests includes women leaders. Now, we see that 50% of women are present in most of the governance committees in which we work. And through their participation in women collectives, we have also observed that more women are seeing the forest as a resource to enable their own economic activities.””
Contributing to the SDGs
CoRe and FES partnership in Odisha has contributed to:
Improvements in land tenure security for community-based forest management and biodiversity protection supporting goals of Climate Action (SDG 13) and Life on Land (SDG 15)
Economic empowerment and women’s leadership supporting goals of No Poverty (SDG 1), Gender Equality (SDG 5) and Reduced Inequality (SDG 10)
Preservation of wetlands and waterbodies contributing to Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6)
Strengthening local and state-level institutions, including novel patterns of more inclusive environmental governance to advance Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions (SDG 16), and Partnerships for the Goals (SDG 17)
What’s Next
In addition to our targeted support to systems change efforts in Odisha, CoRe has worked with FES to mainstream an organizational approach to systems change analysis for civil society mobilization.
Since the start of CoRe and FES collaboration in Odisha, this includes parallel support to testing and adapting the approach in seven other Indian states including Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Jointly, CoRe and FES have created a practice-oriented field guide, called “Pathways to Systems Change: Guidance on systems change analysis for field practitioners. The guide details the systems change analysis methodology, including pitfalls and insights drawing on learnings from across five states in India.
As part of our commitment to national and cross-regional exchange, CoRe also bringing the insights and good practices from this work to other partnerships, including in Guatemala and Kenya.