Include external knowledge in the project team

To succesfully capture and disseminate lessons learned it is useful to include knowledge management expertise when designing the project team. This is one of the messages of our evaluation of a multi-country forest governance project. The project focuses on a participatory approach with unpredictable and mostly intangible outcomes, depending on stakeholders outside the project. Learning on multi-stakeholder dialogues results mostly in implicit knowledge. To make such knowledge explicit you need expertise from outside the forest community. A good example of such need was the way a professor forest management was conducting a workshop to write up lessons learned (left column). The result were academic articles, with little news. Interviews with participants afterwards revealed that they knew much more and had more relevant insights than were written up in the academic exercise. In the right column a more effective approach is provided to make such knowledge explicit.