Concretely, it works to improve political framework conditions for the sustainable management of forest ecosystems and the preservation of forest-related environmental services in selected countries in that area.

In Lebanon, the project supports the development of a National Forest Program (NFP) in a multi-stakeholder process under the lead of the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture (MoA).
Hence, in the training in Lebanon participants from the MoA as well as various other national ministries, NGOs and research institutes that need to be involved in jointly developing a comprehensive and inclusive NFP took part. The planning of the NFP multi-stakeholder development and consultation process was also the core topic of the participants’ working groups during the workshop. In three groups they elaborated the joint processes and upcoming events, looking at inter-ministerial cooperation, regional consultation workshops as well as options how to integrate current opponents of the NFP in a sustainable forest management system. To provide a common base for discussion, the MoA gave a presentation of the current status quo of the NFP process, followed by a presentation on recent sector policy analysis conducted by an external consultant.

This tailor-made workshop was the first of a series of three trainings to be run for this project, the next trainings will take place for the national implementation processes in Tunisia and Morocco.