FLEGT Facilitators and Technical Assistants to VPA countries

Successful VPA processes will ultimately depend on how relevant stakeholders support VPA commitments and work together to implement them. To this aim, it is essential to ensure effective participation of a wide variety of stakeholders during both VPA negotiations and implementation. Ensuring that stakeholders can engage in a meaningful manner requires that stakeholders can identify their interest in the process, that they can follow what is being discussed and propose ways for their needs to be taken up in the VPA process, and that they have the political space for voicing their positions. The successful process will foster a changed way of working between government and non state actors, where government plays a key role in balancing different sets of interests and ensures that all stakeholders support the resulting agreement and its implementation.

Supporting roles have been established in a number of partner countries to respond to the needs of the VPA process. This paper introduces two: the FLEGT Facilitator and the Technical Assistant to a partner country administration. It aims to explain the differences and complementarities between these two supporting functions. It draws from experiences in VPA countries as outlined in Table 1.